A hand-shaped black knocker, such as those used to swing on the doors of old houses, is fixed to one of the Brotéria gallery walls in Noé Sendas’ exhibition Goin’ Home. It contains a small sheet of paper with the sentence: l’Atitude du hasard. Crowning it is a quadrilateral drawing that repeats itself in an arc. It leads to a perceptive game: is it a chair multiplying with its backrest? Or rather shapes that are outlined without any previous intentional shape? Are they recurring visual memories of a certain place that cannot be visited, or are they random doodles?

As we know, it is impossible to establish a single idea of a house. It can be a place to live, a mirror of the soul, or even just something in the imagination. We revisit one or more houses in our memory. They may be lost/visited dwellings, or the first one we knew as a child, that same one that shaped our own idea of family. Even Vermeer used the house as a medium to portray narratives on society and domesticity. Artists’ work can also summon up the deafening emptiness, the asphyxiating isolation provided by the house. A place of experiences, at times happy, at times intolerable, it actually embodies the most authentic human being, sans masks, in a perpetual and raw dialogue with the self, in private.

In the seminal work The Poetics of Space, Bachelard speaks of the house as “an instrument of analysis for the human soul,” adding: “Not only our memories, but also our forgetfulness are housed there. Our unconscious is housed there. Our soul is a dwelling”[1]. This is perhaps the reason why Noé Sendas’ pieces emerge as fractions of memory, scraps of meaning, incomplete images, only to immediately vanish into the shadows, like unreachable drawers, where we can only scrutinize a few ghostly traces, a few loose sentences, to the extent that their meanings appear broken, compromised.

According to the exhibition’s curator Ana Anacleto, Sendas “has been developing a deeply idiosyncratic plastic research, focused on recovering and reactivating images, objects, devices or materials that – by way of tiny re-composition gestures – seem to express a fictional imagination grounded in mnemonic references from very different origins. All matter in his practice becomes document, all document is also fiction, all fiction is transversally real and all the elements present (physical or imagined) are at every moment shaped as activating mechanisms for possible relationships”[2].

Noé Sendas’ work has a psychological inwardness to it, seemingly robbing us of the logical interpretative possibility and the objectivity of a hypothetical autobiographical narrative or even of the artist’s individuality. The sensation of incompleteness and the enigma continue. It is he, the artist himself, who seeks to intoxicate the viewer: “I like to project the idea that the artist is someone who casts a glamor, a spell that clouds the viewer’s gaze and makes the images be perceived in a different way. Indeed, this is why I use the technique of sprezzatura (the art of veiling art), whereby the final image reveals neither that it has been worked on nor that it had a prior existence.”[3]

The artist grew up in studios – his parents were artists themselves – and, in an interview with Jean Wainwright[4], mentioned that, when he was a child, not many finished works hung on the wall. The artist became used to seeing a version of artists’ studios that was more pragmatic and immersed in daily life than the museum’s formality. Sendas, meanwhile, is an artist who has lived in several European cities. Raised in Brussels, he moved to Lisbon and then to London. He may understand, perhaps, a more polarized, disjointed, sutured idea of house.

Noé Sendas’ drawings communicate this fleeting nature, more the transience than the wholeness of the form; more the movement, the trace, or even the loss, in Didi-Hubberman’s terms, than the representation, as mentioned by Lara Pires in the article As séries Crystal Girls e Peeps de Noe Sendas: entre revelação (fotografia) e construção (imagem)[5].

His 2009 Crystal Girls also included a combination of found[6] and then doctored images, fragments of glamorous bodies coupled with stylized geometric shapes.

Goin’ Home is at Brotéria, in Lisbon, until January 15, 2025.

[1] Bachelard, G. (2000). The Poetics of Space. Martins Fontes.
[2] Anacleto, A. (2024). Noé Sendas, Goin’Home. Organização Brotéria (Exhibition text).
[3] Dias, A. (2014). O trabalho de Noé Sendas na Galeria Presença (The Eighteenth January Two Thousand and Fourteen). www.artecapital. net/exposicao-402-noe-sendas-theeighteenth-january-two-thousandand-fourteen.
[4] Noé Sendas: Vanishing Acts, interview by Jean Wainwright. https://jeanwainwright.com/noe-sendas-vanishing-acts-with-interview/
[5] Pires, L. V. C. (2016). “As séries Crystal Girls e Peeps de Noe Sendas: entre revelação – fotografia e construção – imagem”. In: Revista Croma, vol. 4, nº 8, pp. 112-116.
[6] Dias, A. Id. Ibid.