Any gesture, any choice, may be seen as a move that reverberates in the flow of time.

Vera Midões has built a pictorial universe that appears to be a game with no pre-defined rules – a fluid and expanding chess game, where forward and backward moves are executed in an unstable balance, in apparent chaos, between programmed strategy and happenstance. As coisas que se vão não voltam nunca, at Dialogue Gallery, manifests itself as a rite of occupation and reinvention, in which body, gesture and painting merge in a continuous ritual.

I attended the exhibition with Vera on one of these days of deluge. The moment we arrived, the conversation spontaneously and naturally veered towards Labirintos de uma Quadrícula. Remnants of a moment that took place at the inauguration can be found in a small space at the back of the first room, bounded by a grid drawn on the floor, with a television broadcasting footage documenting the mechanics of a game that had taken place there. The artist is quick to point out that this exhibition was inspired by the desire to revisit and follow up on the performance that took place in Madrid last year. This is a shared moment, with a varying duration, where the gesture of delimiting the space that constructs a game board, the artist’s body and the sounds of Rodrigo Amado’s saxophone and Luís Lopes’ guitar become agents of the same sensitive field – tactile and sonic. The relationship between the three performers is organic, lively and based on improvisation and impulse, almost as if Midões’ arm were the very extension of the sound. A sense of contagion runs between the bodies and the music that invades the venue, a fusion that echoes the very physicality of the performance. The footage on the TV amplifies the notion of a game, emphasising the continuous transformation of the three agents on stage. As pawns on a board, as chess pieces that move backwards and forwards, they are reinventing the space and also being moulded by it.

In view of this sort of unrehearsed choreography, Vera asked the musicians about the rules of the game. The artists’ reaction was quite simple: they did not want any. But there was one: do not step on the recently painted black squares and, as far as possible, keep the white squares intact. This sole restriction speaks as a metaphor, exposing the dialectic between freedom and restriction, randomness and structure, by creating a dynamic area of possibilities that reflect, on the one hand, the unpredictability of life and, on the other, the strategies we adapt, the leaps of faith we take and the restraints we feel.

This occupational philosophy is transferred to the two-dimensional plane. The paintings punctuating this first room are territories where figures take shape through colour, layers, cut-outs and collages, fragmenting and reconstructing accounts that can be both individual and collective. In her creative process, the artist is known to operate in a dialectic between hoarding and purging: she collects experiences, sensations and images to release them through expression. As with the free jazz of Labirintos de uma Quadrícula, where improvisation guides form, Midões allows her own artistic creativity to be pushed to the limit without ever being exhausted, without ever ending, creating a controlled chaos where each pictorial gesture is both spontaneous and surgical.

On the other side of the room, standing in front of Alegoria (2025) and Reflexo (2025), the tension built up by the layout of the works in the gallery is palpable. The spatial dynamic is quite strategic, also reminiscent of a three-dimensional game board where each piece – each canvas – takes up a specific spot, in dialogue with the other works and with us. The bonds between the works are built by proximity and distance, by the contrast between bright tones and darker compositions, building a carefully orchestrated dynamic of oppositions and resonances. The confrontation of colours and dimensions generates a controlled discomfort, a visual friction that keeps the eye restless, as if looking for balance between fragments of one or more narratives with no fixed plot – a stream of interpretative possibilities. It feels as though, as we walk through the exhibition, we are moving through this ambiguous chessboard, where decoding visual clues is necessary – or not – and where immersion is essential in the search for clues that reveal concealed layers. Each work is like a house where the audience must pause, reflect, wait for the next move, as if in anticipation of an order: Go to the starting square, go back 3 squares. But, unlike a conventional board game, the rules here are not pre-defined – only the unlimited possibility of readings, where everyone’s experience dictates the next steps.

Apart from the way the works are arranged, the different lines of enquiry that structure the narrative approaches also add tension. In lighter-toned works with prominent colours, Midões explains that she is interested in ‘the deconstruction of figures and spaces’. These paintings, where chaos abides, but not necessarily disarray, reflect on the complexity of our own identity layers. For instance, in Alegoria (2025), which depicts a cave, Vera allows us to glimpse its fragmented figures.

On the other hand, in the darker works, the tension emerges not from the radical deconstruction of form, but from the interplay between light and shadow, where everything is set in its own particular atmospheres. A goat faces its own image in Reflexo (2025), in an ontological disquiet, questioning its own existence; while another figure longs for the light, asking and demanding to enter the light“^[1], as if dwelling on a threshold between revelation and oblivion. Each composition’s design appears to be born and grow through Midões‘ orders, which she receives from something unfolding beyond her – ’the man with the key is missing and the man with the key comes back… I keep repeating figures in various paintings, but they do different things, they have other ways of being, other forms of expression‘.

The recurring shapes and figures in her work are also part of a continual logic of reconfiguration, a reminder that nothing is fixed, but is transformed, resurfacing under new terms and meanings, an idea to which the title also refers, but more on that in a minute.

Vera’s art is a sort of emotional and symbolic purge of her experiences – feelings, places, people and memories that then become pictorial material. Each composition rings out like a mirror of impermanence and the continuous reconstruction of the self.

We spent some time in another room standing in front of Arena (2025) – a work that, when paired with another of different dimensions, seems colossal and continues the tension already felt. The figures inhabiting this composition are laid out like gladiators from different eras and narratives, involved in different dialogues and clashes. A dramatic charge underlies the arrangement of the figures, a play of forces, a symbolic struggle between different orders and time periods. The elements punctuating the canvas emphasise the concept of codes, clues, traces of an enigma whose solution is elusive. The presence of hybrid and anthropomorphic beasts, which appear as the result of extensive research and the artist’s visual and iconographic archive, heightens this ambiguity. They are expressive agents that carry human traits, manifestations of urges and emotions that we recognise as our own, and reflect a territory of unease and fragmentation.

Interrogatório (2025), presented in the same room, stands out for its seemingly restrained nature. Contrary to the visual density of Arena, this work is built on silence and reprieve. The scene is almost theatrical: a policeman-nurse, with his finger set to punish, forces his presence on a space filled with suspense, where one figure seems to smile as he learns the outcome. A telephone that never rings – or perhaps rings without anyone answering – adds to the atmosphere of disquiet and powerlessness, a visual echo of power relations perhaps.

Refúgio do Invisível (2025) is based on the logic of mutability and transformation, subjects that reverberate in the very title of the exhibition. The work explores the idea of refuge as a transitory space, in which invisibility can be both a form of protection and erasure.

As coisas que se vão não voltam nunca convenes the idea of impermanence and continuous flux. Each instant is hopelessly undone by the next. Vera Midões, inspired by Federico García Lorca’s poem Cata-Vento, is exploring, in this exhibition, fields of perpetual mutation, of changing memories – “I feel that things that are gone can never be the same again. Our body is constantly adding things, mutating, and it can never return to form. The most naïve, child-like, somehow authentic form. We are always amassing things, spaces, times… it forces us to appreciate what is left behind.“ Her work, then, is structured as an archaeological study of the ephemeral, where the cumulative experiences are translated into a densely layered visual language. Her use of collage, layering and the coexistence of fragmented elements all stress this dialectic between that which is lost and that which persists in new forms.

We discussed how she keeps up an intimate dialogue with poetry, not just as a source of inspiration, but as a structuring principle of her own visual structure and way of thinking. We discussed Surrealism. We talked about the information overload, at which point Vera said ‘as in my works… Either you have a sense of empathy with my canvases and so you spend time with them, you analyse them… or some things get lost. A lot is happening in my works, it is difficult to assimilate everything at first.” The truth is that the sheer density of signs in these games Midões has designed defies a rushed gaze and demands a long involvement. During the final stage of the visit, Vera had an insight that stuck with me: “I’m interested in the idea that we actually do not miss out on things that we believe we have missed out on“.

It may be that, if we linger long enough, nothing is lost. Perhaps it will all be changed or remain hidden, waiting to be purged and then resurface with new expressions, new forms, in new plots – like Vera’s figures. As coisas que se vão não voltam nunca is a combination of reinvention and metamorphosis and can be visited until March 29, 2025.

^[1] Vera Midões on the work.