There has been an enormous wealth of knowledge in art on space, design and the images we harbour of those places we inhabit. It has also proved valuable in teaching us about the way we perceive the world, shapes and the more or less isolated, more or less communal object experience. The representation of life in space. The representation of the body in space. Even when they are absent. For art is this strangely odd phenomenon, embracing any sort of contradiction or oxymoron, which makes one restless, tense and, on the other hand, reassures those who gaze into the void.

A line in space is a line on the body. A line in space is a body gesture: vibrating, churning organs – liminal agents of memory, identity and social constructions. There is always one more side to this endless polyhedron called art: a different angle, an obtuse perspective, a left-field perspective on reality that seems new, unprecedented, revealing and, at times, delightful.

Nuno Sousa Vieira and Tamara Arroyo essay a space in Canhoto As Zurdo that, as well as these different dimensions, mediates tensions between interior and exterior, public and private. Through the performative way in which visitors are forced to freely, slowly and closely navigate the space, they uncover the intimate relationship between micro-perceptions and drawing. This is a blurred landscape, a developing idea, an imagined, dreamed-up, improvised construction. It is both a personal memory and an anthropological and sociological enquiry – the sort that Bachelard would call a poetic image, dangling in verses yet to be said, in words yet to be written, in meanings yet to be unearthed, endlessly, doubly, infinitely.

They both have this way of scrutinising life in the world. Left-handed – in Spanish Zurdos -, their relationship with everyday life is based on this deviation from the norm, on a critical adaptation to minor things and, at times, a nonconformist resistance and objection to the cyclopean apparatus that keeps the many human flows and phenomena rotating and pulsating. The hand coordinates a gesture, which coordinates the body, which coordinates cognitive and emotional states. Events are always viewed through a different prism, through a different lens – a possibly subversive one. Esconsos, as Sousa Vieira would say, in an obtuse or acute gradient of a plane torn and projected into space.

A windowpane shatters. It is neither rubble nor ruin. It is a drawing by chance that reveals faults and registers a sequence of lines and fragments. Art is in charge of piecing together the sudden fragmentation, unveiling unpredictability, falling, death and reconstruction. We no longer have an outside and an inside from these panes. We have something else, some other reality or space – one that belongs to the artist or to art, opening us up to abstract shapes, colours and shards. Stripped of transparency, the landscape we see from these windows consists of opaque colours, the possible scenery for the interior or exterior of the artist’s mind. The artist trades the human voyeuristic libido for the artistic libido. We are not peeping at anyone. We peer into the form of colour, drawing, dissolution and post-industrial archaeology.

With Nuno Sousa Vieira, the window is a gateway device between two uncertain realms, but it is also an object whose signs and meanings may be subjected to the law of plasticity, folding, breaking, unravelling and repairing. The construction of Procuramo-nos (2024) sparkles in its details. The minutiae of wedges, additions, chiselled and carved pieces used to hold the piece in a borderline balance. This piece owes as much to sculpture as it does to drawing, like Visão Embaçada (série 3) (2024) owes as much to drawing as it does to painting.

A sole works as a wedge and harks back to a memory of a space where the artist once worked and grew up, the SIMALA factory. The usefulness of memory is as evanescent as it is perennial, as spectral as it is material. Forever reusable. A defect is never undone in the circularity of art.

If drawing appears in Sousa Vieira in a vaguely architectural spatiality, the urban phenomenon is revealed in Tamara Arroyo. Railings, rubbish, windows seen from the outside, the materiality of iron, ceramics and objects reminiscent of plastic or polystyrene populate the space in a sort of Antropologia Urbana. But there is an ironic edge and a playful or subversive ethos that neutralises the fence as a marker of public or private areas. The fence acquires a re-combining spirit, its design frees itself from its purpose to exist as a structure and graphic record in space.

The plastic bag loses its floating and fluttering lightness to acquire a fixity and mass that crumbles under gravity. It is not plastic, it is ceramic, but it appears alive and animated by the wind. Like food boxes or a blue piece of canvas, it is the obstacle to human occupation. Rubbish takes on a different role, it becomes a naturalised presence.

Arroyo appears to be conveying something eschatological in this urban space perspective. Something made of human beings, plus their waste and spoils; of a fenced property that manifests something anal, Freudian and primal. A well-defined possession, enclosed by iron fences, which unintentionally serve as a sieve for dirt. Arroyo seems to break with all of this, without ceasing to reveal it.

Nevertheless, in both cases, the perception phenomenon and art perception engage the observer, combining proximity and distance, peripatetic wanderings and dwelling areas. In fact, we no longer speak of space. Instead, we talk about place, filled with identities that dialogue and live together idiosyncratically, perhaps not as friends, perhaps not as partners or colleagues, but as good neighbours.

Nuno Sousa Vieira and Tamara Arroyo’s Canhoto As Zurdo is on display until July 18 as part of Kindred Spirit Projects, curated by Sérgio Fazenda Rodrigues and Virginia Torrente. This is an exhibition held as part of the Hosts programme, which serves as a one-off reception for creators or projects, under an invitation regime addressed specifically to artists from the different art fields.