Alfaia – Associação Cultural strives to plot a dynamic map of its region, with viewpoints that see this context (historical, cultural, geographical, …) from within and without. The purpose is to focus more on the dynamic idea of image-building than on that of a static map: with open calls and artist residencies, challenging artists from diverse backgrounds and generations, the plan is to explore changing pathways. This is a risky proposition, but it has also led to many surprises. The exhibition Mar Deserto – Oxímoros para uma ausência is one of these breathtaking and astonishing consequences.

The surprise effect is first suggested by the vagueness: the two initial words of the title can be understood either as a continuum of two names (in which the reading is opened rather than closed by the elision of the articulatory element between them), “mar” (sea) and “deserto (desert); and also as a noun syntagma in which the noun itself is adjectivised (a “sea” that is found or described as “desert”, either by synonymy with “vazio” (empty) or antinomy with “habitado” (inhabited) or “cheio” (full). What can an exhibition that does (not) define its own title have to offer?

Vagueness is a way of instability. The moment the visitor enters the gallery, whose premises are familiar to her, she finds them different: the floor she steps on is not the usual smooth flat concrete: it has been replaced by an unstable gait on uneven ground; it is covered – unexpectedly in its entirety – by swathes of earth and sand, graded according to geological memory, lighter at the entrance and darker further in. Rather than seawater, the steps are carpeted with earth grains: the absent water is therefore affirmed in yet another of the perceptible oxymorons. According to programmer Miguel Cheta, the imposing artefact holding centre stage in the exhibition was tested for its practicality at sea. This is a seagull-plough, a tool for entertainment, locomotion or ploughing, made from wooden elements (logs, boards, small pegs), cork and metal parts, mainly used to articulate and steer this “car” that João Mouro (b. 1985) named Cortição. Another oxymoron emerges from this piece (the definition of a term or object through its intrinsic nature based on its very opposite): the barge or land cart is made from tree matter, essentially vertical in nature – but it operates, although indeterminate, on horizontal elements such as water and land. (The horizon line does not seal the plane, ultimately, and everything may be submerged or drilled into). The two buoys (Boia Megafone and Boia dos Ventos), towering sculptures that round off João Mouro’s trio and share materials and style with Cortição, stand between it and the visitor, spawning intrusions that fill it – the car is on a deserted terrain, but the terrain, in fact, is inhabited by other artefacts. 

Mar Deserto works on varying dimensions. Firstly, it features oversized pieces, such as Mouro’s trio (their spatial and functional shift makes them larger, but their meaning in the exhibition is derived from this deviation); secondly, it displays elements that almost slip under the radar, either in their smallness or in the subtlety with which they blend in with the earth and sand waves – this is true of Filipa Tojal’s Alfarrobas Caiadas (b. 1993), whose stint at the Tokyo University of the Arts seems to reflect an eye for the minimal, the ephemeral, and embracing his manufacturing tools as aesthetic objects: in fact, the number one piece in the exhibition are the brushes he made from palm leaves and esparto, with which he created a set of delicate drawings – or, in other words, evidence of the relationship his hands established with earth pigments, lime, acrylic and the paper that now serves as their support. The pigments are lime and earth, but the resulting tones are mostly green: yet another oxymoron? The earth colour carries within it the colour of what emerges from it, or of what exudes from it (such as the sea or a lake that may have once stood where Serra do Caldeirão rises today).

Accustomed to expressing herself through photographs or films (her 2024 O Jardim em Movimento was part of the most recent edition of the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes), Inês Lima (b. 1993) writes (by hand and typewriter, as if to emphasise the permanent, definitive nature of the statement): “Ñ ME APETECE FAZER UM FILME” / “I don’t feel like film-making one bit.” She opted for a notebook with hand-sewn pages, where she draws a journal of the artistic process. Beside the notebook, which one can handle freely, headphones let us listen to some of the passages entered on the pages (we can even hear the artist humming a song). There, elementary creation strata are recorded, from the initial qualms and research (“I checked out Merriam-Webster to see what o x y m o r o n means”), to an apparently haphazard connection with a pop song. The spin-offs from the concept hide and reveal the artist’s presence in the creative act; the Algarve, premise and condition, emerges and fades away, constantly present in how thinking occasionally absents itself from it.

Jorge Graça (b. 1978) takes on the photographic idiom. His pictures offer another way of stating the exhibitive oxymoron. They are distinct from the other pieces, starting with the harmonised format and the black and white choice, whereas the rest of the room is coloured. But each photograph – and what the visitor sees in them – shows how much they are constructed of oppositions: the initial perception reveals animal shapes; a closer look unveils lichens, fossils, seeds, once more enlarging what, outside the photographic image, would be tiny. The expanded concept of territory is outlined in the details and the attention paid to them.

In this show, the exhibition text is also a vital part: it not only identifies the title, author and year of creation, but also the pieces’ materials and dimensions, as well as geographical and altimetric coordinates which refer to locations related to the displayed works. (For instance, in João Mouro’s three-piece set, the reference may be to places where the wood, cork and gourds used were harvested). The verses of a Gastão Cruz poem, quoted at the bottom of the same page, lead us, meanwhile, to a landscape that embodies the “nature” of which the poet speaks, when we read that “nature is / no longer the temple of living pillars / but the temple of time in which between the / living that lived and that shall live / we only recall the brief swell / of tides and roots”. (I purposely left the places unidentified so that visitors can be stunned).

The aim of this information cross-referencing is more than a re-reading of the works, or an invitation to engage with the visitor: it involves an equally surprising and highly appreciated appearance by the curator Leonor Lloret (b. 1981), an absent but active participation that is as visible as the works on show in Galeria Alfaia are tangible and present.

All things become present in this exhibition, where what one sees is also missing – above all the sand/earth, the bedrock of every piece, the common ground that binds the visitor to the place, carrying them out of the gallery by being inside it; making them relive a landscape through the reflection that it, through the art process, induces; ultimately, bringing it into existence.

MAR DESERTO – Oxímoros para uma ausência can be seen at Galeria Alfaia in Loulé until August 31, 2024. The venue is open on Thursdays and Fridays from 2.30 pm to 6 pm and on Saturdays from 10.30 am to 1.30 pm and 2.30 pm to 6 pm. Partnership: Galerias Municipais de Loulé and the Loulé City Council.