The medieval English term Yepsen, which lends its title to Pedro Tudela and Sérgio Fernandes’ exhibition, describes the way the hands are cupped. This is a unit of measurement describing the volume that can be accommodated in the space between them. By no means indifferently, the exhibition opens with Yepsen (2024), a photograph by Pedro Tudela. But these hands reach us empty: their volatile contents have escaped through the fingers. These hands, the doorway to the exhibition, only bring us a handful of time – after all, time is life’s only metric.

The work of both artists is put into dialogue in YEPSEN(S), in a fertile process of cross-contamination and effect on each other. The outcome of extensive sound research, Pedro Tudela’s pieces reflect on the materiality of sound. Vinyl records and the pentagram of musical notation – tangible evidence of the sound that pervades the gallery premises – are recurringly mentioned here. These elements can be seen in % (static) and ~~~~~, but are also recalled in I’LL N’Y A PAS DE MOUVEMENT, by Sérgio Fernandes. Playing on the affinities between on and off canvas, this sound investigation apparently finds echoes within Fernandes’ paintings, implying the rhythmic patterns intrinsic to the painting process. I’m alluding to a bodily rhythm, inextricable from the gesture of a person painting directly with their hand, but especially to the rhythm of the material – that which determines the crystallisation of the marks of the process, the oxidation, the oozing and blistering of the oil paint.

These two bodies of work, albeit distinct, form an unusually coherent stain. I can see a rhizomatic structure that they have in common, a subterranean unravelling of a sort of dormant temporal consciousness. As visceral as it is opaque, Sérgio Fernandes’ paintings conjure up a too human, violently fleeting time. A time based solely on the continuity of HEARTBEAT, working in a threshold moment between life and death, flowing blood and static, coagulated blood. In the same way, % (static), by Pedro Tudela also hints at the frailty of this time. The static sound, signalling the beginning and end of a vinyl record, stands for a waiting time – unpredictable, unceasingly erratic – between that which has not yet started and that which has just come to an end. To be alive is also to be in static, hanging between a beginning and an end, followed by an uninterrupted, unsettling and, simultaneously, impenetrable noise.

There is only one piece in YEPSEN(S) that stands apart from the rest. Set at the back of the gallery, TEMPO however seems to summarise the essence of the exhibition. Consisting of old sea surveillance flags on which ‘TEMPO’ has been written, this piece illustrates the effect of time on matter. The winds and ongoing sun exposure were behind the progressive degradation of this fabric: burnt, shredded, ruined by the passing of yet another holiday season. The piece’s almost self-explanatory title confirms that the subject of this exhibition is indeed a matter of time. With its simple attention to detail, YEPSEN(S) reclaims a fleeing, accidental time: that of the LED bulbs’ impermanence, in TIALTNGO; that of the corroding of matter in the interlude of time. It is exactly in this gap – forgotten in the frenzied pace of life – that this handful of time is exhausted.

The exhibition is at Kubik Gallery in Lisbon until March 1.