In the text accompanying her most recent exhibition at Rialto 6, Catarina Dias introduces us to her excess. The artist tells us that she isn’t particularly articulate, which is why we might find – among the works that dot the gallery space – dead ends, incongruities and impossible relationships. We haven’t entered the exhibition yet and we can already foresee a sort of inconsistency, as we read later in one of his pieces. But if, at first glance, this text seems to announce a heteroclite visual universe, For Every Last Thing presents a formally coherent work, based on an uninterrupted exploration of the surface, its formal and creative limits.

The artist seems interested in mapping the elements and textures that inhabit her imagination. It’s about breaking down the boundaries between different materials and reporting, through extensive compositional work, the effects of this coexistence. For this reason, the group of works in this exhibition is unusual. On the top floor of the gallery, we see Through us, a series of metal sculptures arranged on the floor – small bodies folded and contorted in on themselves, softened by the heat emanating from To breathe an empty space. In contrast to the weight of these bodies is Untitled, a piece of fabric suspended like a curtain over the gallery window. The view of the street is replaced by dense vegetation and the foam of the sea swell that peeks through the leaves. Are we, after all, in a territory close to the Tropics? If this piece takes us to a remote place, Only and Yet, produced in graphite and acrylic on paper, seem to evoke the textures of urban space, graffiti and the writings that mark its surface. There is a feeling of imminent disorientation, an impossibility of stitching together the distant times and places presented here.

On the other walls of the gallery, we find a series of works in giclée printing that reveal equally inconclusive images: fragmented, juxtaposed and confined to the plane of a two-dimensional surface. They bring together traces of something we can’t fully comprehend. The scales of a snake. A tattoo on the skin and jeans with a black leather belt. A naked body lying on a yellow silky sheet. An explosion and a sci-fi-like setting, with white lights and sterile walls. The images seem to link together, but they start a narrative that almost always falls apart. There are tears, cuts, and ink stains that spread liquidly over the paper, preventing us from seeing behind them. And once again, alienation is emphasised – a feeling of not belonging, of being faced with fragments that don’t seem to fit together.

Then there’s the word. Small verses are superimposed on the fragmented surfaces, exploring the relationship between word and image, the legible and the indecipherable: Without saying the impossibility of it / Extracting from a resistant object. Is the word a legend, a clue that allows us to build a narrative around these fragments? There remains a desire to assimilate strangeness, capturing it within a discursive order. But these bodies of text seem, above all, to reflect the impossibility of extracting meaning from an object that is resistant to the interpretative project itself. The exhibition, which initially described a formal work on the surface of the objects, now refers to an innate disorientation, an adverse reaction of the objects to our attempt to decipher them. After all, It all lies heavily on the surface. We are therefore condemned to the surface and to the impossibility of knowing. And there is a freedom that comes from this – a freedom that makes us foreigners while allowing us to welcome enigma, chaos and inconsistency.

The exhibition is on view at Rialto 6 until 18 April.