Zaratan is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year as a structure and venue focussed on creating, producing and spreading contemporary art in Portugal. The association has been involved in promoting artists since 2014 by setting up new communication routes and boosting cultural and creative processes based on alternative and innovative proposals. Its programme and agenda are hallmarked by a wide range of exhibitions and events, and it has prioritised an inclusive and cross-disciplinary approach, celebrating multiple artistic languages. It is constantly challenging and redefining curatorial procedures in the contemporary context, establishing dialogues that question conventional approaches. The new exhibition is proving to be no exception.

As part of the ten-year celebration, Felix Vong is coming forward with a new identity, a kind of inverted reflection: NATARAZ, “an imaginary animal, a sister (or brother), who only appears every 10 years to reflect on and retrospectively explore the passage of time”^[1]. His first solo show in Portugal is an exhibition that addresses, inescapably, the ebb and flow of time and the revisiting of the past from an in-depth and critical viewpoint. It looks at and transforms memory, encouraging us to consider the linearity of time and offering instead a kind of circularity or, in some way, a creative repetition of what has already been done and displayed in the gallery in the past.

The artist refers to and references several of the fifty exhibitions held over the last decade. Either by means of one piece (which is always a nod to another) or by harnessing a specific concept, Vong provides, as well as a clear revisiting, a renewed perception of the artists’ works.

Vong is known to venture into different media, such as painting, drawing, illustration, performance and photography. He has also undertaken this endeavour through an incisive, rather blunt critique of the art world and its stakeholders, challenging the traditional roles of those operating in the field and the entities that broker the artistic experience. His works always possess a deeper layer that defies immediate perception and encourages the viewer to become more sharply involved and reflective, going beyond the aesthetic experience. It pushes us to deconstruct conventional ways of perceiving and interpreting art, challenging the system and, if we wish, with sarcasm and humour, the notions of intellectual property and artistic identity.

His creations and practices have had ethical and aesthetic ramifications, raising key questions about the impact of appropriation, the pressure between the genuine and the simulated, reinterpretation and authorship, disrupting conventions and pushing the very limits of these concepts. He does so with irony, humour and awe for the artists he ‘embodies’ – “I started my artistic practice by deriding the arts that I value most in other artists. George Bernard Shaw once said: ‘Imitation is not just the sincerest form of flattery – it’s the sincerest form of learning’. However, today I assert that ‘I simulate, therefore I exist’. Whenever I develop a new idea, I go through a sort of rebirth, where I turn into someone else, to embody another life”^[2].

With NATARAZ, as a celebration and tribute – but without ever letting go of the taunting undertone -, he pours over references, resorting to quasi-copies, appropriations, reinterpretations and more or less subtle suggestions. This exercise in repetition and revival is Vong’s way of opening doors to an infinite number of possibilities, where the frontiers between the original and the derivative, the visible and the suggested are constantly renegotiated and redefined.

As proof of his interest in exploring memory and his willingness to cast a glance at the past in this exhibition, as soon as we enter we see a clock (Sem título, 2024) -, the first piece the artist mentions when talking about the exhibition. Inspired by Susana Borges’ work, it is a modified object that runs the other way round, defying conventional perspectives on time. Stripped of its primary function and with its movement reversed, it acts as an invitation to enter an alternative temporality and space^[3], preparing us to revisit the exhibitions we are about to see.

Don’t touch trees!!! (2024) and Hands on my sculpture recognise the past through a different artistic strategy – reminiscing about events that happened in the gallery. The first, in collaboration with Chikki Chikki, is based on Ana Pessoa’s Floresta Mágica to reiterate the expected behavioural norms at an exhibition. Whereas in the past some visitors may have unauthorisedly tampered with one of the artist’s textile trees, in Vong’s work there is an appeal to breach etiquette. With playful fabric sculptures that may be handled and are detached from the composition, visitors are allowed possibilidade única de restituição artística (an unprecedented possibility of artistic restitution)^[4]. On the other hand, Hands on my sculpture is a reminder of a robbery attempt that led to the shattering of two of the several chalk bars impregnated with coloured pharmaceuticals that made up Bárbara Bulhão’s Água Temperamental (2018). The artist created Hands on my sculpture in 2019, a series of images from the surveillance camera that taped the incident, and now Vong uses the title and recreates the chalk sculptures and the break-in for this exhibition.

Counting of Lápis Azul (2024) mentions two exhibitions by Sara & André. The first, Pequeno Museu da Rua de São Bento e Arredores, was held in 2015 and the second, Lápis Azul, in 2024. For the former, the artists commissioned the team to tally the exhibition’s visitors and, from this count, done with dashes on a piece of paper, emerged the work Contagem dos visitantes do Pequeno Museu da Rua de São Bento e Arredores (on display in the gallery). This year, the group exhibition Lápis Azul, which reflected on freedom of expression as one of the key milestones of the Carnation Revolution, gave visitors a pencil version created by the artists. Vong decided to keep track of the number of pencils handed out in the same way, and the final score resulted in the work now on show.

This contamination between works and research, and the use of references to artists previously mentioned and others such as António Olaio, Cristina Motta, Fábio Colaço, primeira desordem, Sara Mealha, etc., pays tribute not just to different artistic practices but also to the venue that hosted the exhibitions, particularly since some of the other works on display are based on a meta-investigation into Zaratan itself^[5]. It touches on its functioning and designation by creating a Wikipedia page (Wikipedia, 2024) and its cyclical nature by putting white shoes (once black) in the centre of one of its rooms, representing the numerous exhibitions and, as a result, the frequent need to paint the walls (The artists who Runs in the Space, 2024). It also includes something that could be taken as a criticism, a mention of financial support by means of a painting of a painting-membership-card (Welcome (cartão de sócio), 2024), possibly referring to the funding woes of the Portuguese art scene, which frequently relies on meagre support. The piece, which will not be completed until it is sold, will bear the name of the future owner in the painting.

To round things off, a farewell in the last room is Till We Meet Again – an inverted depiction of the painting that Carlos Gaspar presented at the gallery in 2022. The rendering of several paths that seem to have different origins, but end up meeting and following the same course, opens up the possibility of a new encounter. We leave with the feeling that, although this is the artist’s first solo show, we may well have experienced a collective journey, one proving that all these artists can coexist in the same place, and that art is – or should be – a living, free organism that breaks down and extends into endless possibilities.

NATARAZ can be visited until September 21.

^[1] https://zaratan.pt/pt/exhibit/120
^[2] https://umbigomagazine.com/pt/blog/2023/04/21/entrevista-com-felix-vong-autor-da-capa-do-mes/
^[3] Exhibiton text.
^[4] Exhibiton text.
^[5] https://zaratan.pt/pt/exhibit/120