You can now sit at a table in Loulé’s Bocage restaurant[1] and enjoy your lunch served on the usual paper towel. This one, however, may be drawn with blue lines outlining floral images, branches, stamens, petal silhouettes. Eating will be enhanced by beauty, art will impact on the daily lives of people who, for example, are not used to attending galleries or museums. Rather than arriving at a blank paper towel which invites us to doodle something on it, we will find a series of sketches encouraging others to do so, set up already, but waiting, in defiance. This flips a certain mealtime sequence around: the paper towels scribbled at the pace of a conversation or boredom are embellished, arousing curiosity from the moment the guest sits down. People who are accustomed to doodling may find it more comfortable to scribble on the paper on which the plates, jars and platters are laid out, aggrieved by the loss of any whiteness that would allow their hand to move freely, or prompted to interact with the lines previously laid out; others not so keen on dabbling may feel invited to create, or upset by the blue lines interfering with what they expect to see every day as the paper’s blankness. These drawn lines (in fine shapes that echo Ana Hatherly’s graphics or, even more so, Lourdes Castro’s herbarium) remind us of the time of perdícia, moments outside the useful routine of everyday life: they are leisure, that which has no purpose enshrined in the profit curve, in finance, in the hourly rush.

This intrusion of doodles on the white towels – which, in fact, are silkscreened drawings on the paper towels provided by the restaurants that took up Alfaia’s challenge, organised by curator Filipa da Rocha Nunes and artist Sara Mealha (b. 1995). Having been decorated, the paper was given back to the restaurants and continues to fulfil its hygienic and protective prandial purpose. This is part of the Perdícia exhibition, which is open to the public until mid-March at the Loulé gallery and marks the start of the 2025/2026 programme. Will it also set the tone? Perdícia features a series of ideas that Alfaia considers relevant to art. Initially, the articulation between artists whose work was connected to the Loulé association at some point; then, the emphasis on the relationship between the art shown within the gallery premises and the suppression of spatial or conventional boundaries (art dilutes, it spills over, if you will, it circumvents established frontiers and it calls places into question); then, as a result of this physical boundary suppression, finding or suggesting features that connect unusual individuals and places around the concept of beauty, of the priceless joy of art.

A statement against market value is made when artistic paper towels are wasted on restaurant tables. But it also seems to be an idea regarding the waste of consumer society (paper towels that, after meals, will meet their shared fate in the bin): the waste-land, pointless, squandered and sterile terrain, was born out of an urge for beauty, the desire for contact, the unsuspected desire for art. The act of offering art in sacrifice of consumption (which is at odds with artistic propensities to use waste to create art, like Vik Muniz or Thomas Hirschhorn, as well as Duchamp’s earlier work) begs the question of what is ultimately waste, the discarded in consumer society. In fact, due to the title of the exhibition/action, the rejection of the concept of des-perdício has a female face: by removing the negative prefix, by feminising the name, Perdícia takes on her own autonomy, grows in body, builds in colour, and acquires the interaction motion.

The silk-screened towels with Sara Mealha’s drawings are not the be-all and end-all of Perdícia. The artist has literally drawn and filled in giant letters on the Alfaia walls, colouring and transforming the space (which she has narrowed down to about half its area with curtains). Ultimately, the exhibition, which leaked out of the gallery through scribbled towels, insists not only on the stillness but also on the transience of that which is installed: is it a site-specific work? Or a performance that reasserts itself? The vivid colours of the letters (or portions of letters, as they are spread with paint from the floor to the ceiling without ever being completed) present themselves as potential doorways that, eventually, expand the space instead of limiting it: during the opening, several visitors (together with the artist and the curator) stood near the shapes painted on the walls as if they were stepping over a three-dimensional obstacle, or crossing a barrier into the non-existent wall depth: walls are thus transformed into diaphanous curtains, gravity into playfulness, rigidity into a fluid world.

Since 2017, when Sara Mealha completed her painting degree at Lisbon’s Faculty of Fine Arts, she has had several exhibitions, especially within Portugal. In 2024, her internationalisation was driven by an invitation from EGEAC (Galerias Municipais de Lisboa) for a ‘non-commercial’ appearance (a ‘project room’) at Madrid’s ARCO fair. From Perdícia‘s point of view, the non-commercialisation of her work and the endurance of art in a world mostly dominated by the rationale of profit and monetary exchange make sense. This is a utopian purpose within an ethos that cherishes lost time, a place that, due to modifications in scale, is scrutinised as a sombre setting, a game with actors usually absent from the art world (for example, those who have their lunch in downtown restaurants). This is a purpose that embraces the fragility of the ephemeral, the volatile, even the unpredictable – persisting in ventures similar to Sara Mealha’s (I remember the formal irreverence of Tomás Cunha Ferreira, who was shown there at the beginning of last summer, or works by Oficina Arara, also on display at the venue, or the concept underlying the artistic workshops) may keep Alfaia in the restless questioning vein that seems to be a fundamental part of its artistic and community project.

[1] Other restaurants in Loulé have also backed the initiative: Flor da Praça, O Pescador, Retiro dos Arcos.