The nature of the classic is elusive. It has been argued that canonical works are those whose unchangeable quality transcends the momentary: crystallised in them, the essence of humanity withstands the changing of circumstances. But does the relevance of the classic stem not from its constancy, but from a unique versatility which is always suited to different, even contradictory, interpretations? To deny the coherence of the one and only meaning altogether for the sake of multiple meanings is to switch existential regimes, sacrificing the soundness of the essence for the vagaries of existence. As Barthes wrote, ‘Each era may indeed believe that it holds the canonical meaning of the work, but all it takes is to broaden history a little for this singular meaning to be turned into a plural meaning and for the closed work to become an open work’^[1].

But it may well be that the certainty of the well-known and the possibility of the unknown are not opposite poles, but two layers strengthening each other in the same structure. The explicit aspects of the work breathe life into a second language that does not contradict the first, but rather expands its range. Driven by the work’s attributes, the audience can find more perspectives than they had thought possible. ‘The symbol is constant,’ Barthes wrote, ‘only the awareness that society has of it and the rights it grants it are variable’^[2].

This dialectic between science and poetry finds a fruitful common ground in the theme of metamorphosis. Ovid’s Metamorphoses combines the timeless and the fleeting through the story of a world whose unending transformations are never a complete identity switch, but rather a more ambiguous dosage: the transformed becomes what they already secretly were, while also holding on to the essence of what they had lost. As victims of vicious passions, their characters are ripped from their centre to embrace the other at the very edges of themselves. Those who give up their essence are the only ones who preserve it – lovers only know what they are by finding themselves in the beloved. Their changing bodies manifest an insurmountable desire, even in the final act: in the tale of Pyramus and Thysbe, a random misfortune drives the couple to commit suicide out of love under the branches of the mulberry tree. Its fruit, once white, becomes red forever when it touches blood.

Fundação Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva, now run by Nuno Faria, is striving to achieve a balance between preserving what is and welcoming what can be. The exhibition 331 Mulberry Trees in Metamorphosis merges new readings of past works and historical interpretations of current ones. ‘The contemporary is not just the present time, but a specific understanding of past events. There are excellent opportunities here to explore new perspectives on the work of Vieira da Silva and Szenes, who constantly changed the way they did things,’ Nuno told me on being asked how a curator with an authorial background and a contemporary leaning could work with the collection of an institution specialised in the most canonical couple of artists of Portuguese modernism. ‘To do a second writing with a first writing of the work’, Barthes wrote, ‘is indeed to open the road to unpredictable renewals’^[3]. This never-ending game of mirrors is present in every aspect of this exhibition which, much like Ovid’s writing, formally embodies the transformative nature of its theme: running until the end of 2025, and in constant flux with a host of works and artists, it is seemingly fuelled by the passion shared between Vieira and Arpad to encourage a five-act general metamorphosis, from the topical O tecido do mundo to the final Ascenção: Vers La Lumiére. ‘Metamorphosis implies a non-binarism, transcending dualities. I do not believe any museum needs or wants to be a place of certainties, but rather a place that is built over time,’ Nuno told me. ‘I’d like this museum to tell stories.’ Between insect men and mammal gods, glass helmets and osseous branches, veined rivers and expressive petals, luminous studies and optical tapestries, subtle coloured curves and undulating glass planes, we are led on a journey where the world itself is the transforming body.

Ovid’s etiological accounts reveal the hidden roots of known things. If, for the poet, the real is the destination, Vieira da Silva’s aim is not to unveil what is already known, but to build something previously off-limits to experience, in an effort to turn the conventional real into a world of bewildering physical constitution. In Le retour d’Orphée, she deals with the Ovidian character who journeys to Hades to find the dead Eurydice. The spatial vertigo, the steep shards, the sedimentary height, the suffocated view and the dark tones express the effort, agony and recklessness of the man who watched his lover die a second time before coming back to life. Orpheus, a wanderer between worlds, is a fitting motif for the painter, who wanted to explore the obstacles of metamorphosis, distorting shapes and lines in the pictorial depths, twisting the classical perspective, forming geometric structures fractured by energy shards whose paradoxical density is akin to the over-solidity of a regenerated bone.

As reality is an encounter between our cognitive devices and the state of the world, Vieira’s well-known abstractions turn not to the world itself, but to the consciousness perceiving it – there she finds not awe, but the drama of a contact that has never been made clear: we rehearse intellectual structures to stabilise an essentially immeasurable world, whose entropy quickly absorbs our mental fabrics. In this eternally transient architecture, reason is emotive and intellect is intuitive, vertigo is stable and reverie is rigorous. Vieira resorts to geometry when examining the nature of reality, more by convention than by conviction – or perhaps just to stress the tensions between the already worn-out methods of modern design and an increasingly uncanny reality. Intuition in her works is as much a help as a disruption to the structure of her creations which, believing in their late arrival and early destruction, manifest the odd paradox of suffocating vastness: the rational subject stares into the abyss only to find that they can see as far as their feeble apparatus allows. Like her figures in La partie d’échecs, we are imprisoned in the fabric of our own intellect.

While Vieira hardly fits within herself, Arpad is committed to the spectacle of the planet. More Ovidian, his impassioned naturalism draws no distinction between spirit and matter – he calls Vieira an animal and paints her as a chrysalis. Even when undergoing metamorphoses, he prefers the real substrate of things, not the possibilities they could assume. In haunted woods or colourful hills, he appears to transform himself into the thing he paints, such is the tangible fascination he feels even in the dark air between the trees, melting it into charcoal. The weight felt in the world blocks the proliferation of voids: his Conversation are like the web of words between lovers, densifying the environment in a relationship unspoilt by time. When he uses methods similar to his partner’s, he does not partake in her claustrophobic torment, as he finds solace in the closed space: just like Vieira, he attempts to bend space, but ultimately succeeds in forming translucent solids like inwardly folded prisms, preserving colour and energy. His most daring abstractions still retain the mass distribution and the original traces of bodies – he never breaks away from the world. Is this perhaps because of his love for Vieira, the central anchor of his experience and model of his practice? He transformed his lover’s body in countless ways, without ever abandoning it entirely.

A lover of the world, he was the first to leave. As if, from beyond, he scattered on Vieira the void that he, forever teeming with life, only found in death, he gifted his lover with the divine light that she would employ in later works such as Ariane, dissolving her mazes in a peaceful paleness of breadth. Delicate under an ethereal freshness, the mental structure conquers the dread of emptiness and submits to the mystery of the absolute. Vieira almost seems to believe that the foundation of reality is not matter, but spirit. When the lover loses their partner, they understand the world through this absence, whose unbearable lightness changes everything – Arpad’s death adds a transcendent note to Vieira. This ascending thrust is the great metamorphosis that shapes the overall arc of the exhibition, the last act of which is, always, light. Ovid’s horizontal metamorphoses, Arpad’s immanence and Vieira’s vertical transformation towards the transcendent end stretch the exhibition’s coordinates between the beginning and the end, the underworld and the afterlife.

Does love, this exhilarating feeling capable of changing the colours of fruit, have such a breathtaking metamorphosis? When the twice-widowed Orpheus finally returns to the world, he may have been relieved to see the once-white blackberries dyed the same red that flows through the lovers’ veins. If art turns the particular into the universal, Pyramus and Thysbe are all the heartbroken couples who believe they can meet again in the ultimate refuge where all mutations finally stop. We could see them as Arpad and Vieira, in the afterlife, at last bringing together his pious immanence and her cerebral scrutiny in an embrace still forbidden to this world where nothing retains the same appearance.

331 Mulberries in Metamorphosis is showing until 31 December, 2025.

^[1] Barthes, Roland. (2007). Criticism and Truth. Lisbon: Edições 70, p. 47-8.
^[2] Id., Ibid., p. 49
^[3] Id., Ibid., p. 13.