In Chinese shadow play, hands move shapes and silhouettes, casting shadows onto a backlit screen. This traditional Chinese theatre also has its own simple version, domestic I would argue, where the hands, and only them, are the leading actors and weave together, unfold and combine in a finger dance and jumble to form such objects, figures or animals.

Luís Paulo Costa’s Todos os Animais at Capela Boa Viagem – a project directed by Hélder Folgado, worthy of note – is a tribute to these theatre performances and stories, where the hands are many and all things.

And if Plato, in the Allegory of the Cave, dared us to leave behind the representation of shadows, embracing the clarity of objects and their outlines, Luís Paulo Costa set us a trap in the opposite direction. As we enter the Capela, we see photographs of hands that apparently can form shadows and represent animals (outside is the commotion of the streets and we accept the slowing down of our perspective; after all, this is a sacred place). We wonder: how many animals are there? None, just hands. Still in doubt, on a second attempt, now stuck to the frames, we ask once more: how many animals are there? None, just hands: painted. This raises yet another element of uncertainty about the technique (oil on paper/inkjet printing). Out of the twenty-six hand photographs adorning the walls of the Capela, they are all paintings. It sounds puzzling, but it forms part of the representation process and the visual deception in which the artist wants to involve us. The shadows are hidden from view, but they appeal to the eye’s ability to imagine, to dream and, ultimately, to create.

The series was developed with the assistance of his daughter Pilar, a bond that for many is certainly a reminder of the nights before sleep, when the white walls were a canvas and the light from the bedside was a narrative projector. Pilar shot the continuous movement of Luís Paulo Costa’s hands. The positions were frozen in multiple photographs. These were then printed in grey scale and redone with grey, blue or yellow pigments. The first version of Todos os Animais, with almost 200 images, was presented at Museu do Côa, where the dialogue between the dozens of gestures was naturally with the pictorial expression of the cave paintings in the Vale do Côa Archaeological Park.

Now, in an exhibition chosen for Capela Boa Viagem, we are on an island. A motherland for shadows and silhouettes (reminiscent of Lourdes de Castro) and Todos os Animais takes on another meaning. Under the watchful eye of the Our Lady, the dialogue is silent and the hands are held up in a choreographed prayer. There are still lifes on the floor and walls, so often celebrated by the masters of painting: there are orange peels in one corner (Laranja II, 2021), and houses of absent snails on the wall (Meanwhile, 2021). These are not peels or shells, but three-dimensional paintings (acrylic or oil on bronze), or painted sculptures. This whole scenario intensifies our haze, keeping open the meaning of that gestural alphabet, the answer to which may be somewhere between an atlas of painting history and the grand dictionary of photographic concepts, but it is all a question of ‘representation’.

Luís Paulo Costa’s Todos os Animais was on show until October 8 at Capela Boa Viagem, but the celebration of contemporary art and culture in Funchal is followed by Alexandre Delmar’s exhibition Dois tons de cinza, which opens on October 21.