dialogue #08
As coisas que se vão não voltam nunca!
Vera Midões
27 Feb. - 29 Mar. 2025
dialogue gallery Marvila
Labirintos de uma quadrícula
Performance with Rodrigo Amado & Luís Lopes
“Things that go away never return”
“Things that go away never return—”. No matter how hard we try to hold on to them, they slip through our fingers—like pieces of a game where we lose ourselves, only to find our way again. Each move opens up new possibilities, reorganising life within the chaos of its unpredictability.
With this premise, the artist makes her solo debut at dialogue gallery, marking the opening of the new space and asserting a body of work that breaks away from the continuity of her previous painting practice. Here, she unveils a collection of pieces dedicated to the deconstruction of the figure and the worlds it inhabits.
Drawing from Federico García Lorca’s 1920 poem Weathervane, the exhibition summons a poetics of change and transformation. Midões presents us with dreamlike universes composed of characters, narratives, and elements that she assembles intuitively—imbued with both the freedom of a child and the critical awareness of an adult. These paintings evoke moments and settings suggestive of departures and confrontations, of worlds in flux, unfolding like an ever-changing game. This imagery carries echoes of surrealism, through its figuration and the interplay between objects and peculiar characters, leading us towards a deconstruction of painting itself. Hybrid beings—half-animal, half-human—manifest absurd contradictions and impossible relationships, symptoms of automatism and the inscription of the unconscious. Yet, beneath this act of creation through paint lies a profound critical awareness of society, a keen-eyed reflection on the shifting world, expressed through an unflinching gesture of freedom.
At once experimental and explosive, impetuous and tempestuous, the painting process reveals itself in layers that form and reform—through glazes, palimpsests, and superimposed collages—concealing and revealing narratives that unfold like an orchestra of shifting rhythms and intensities. Yet they remain rooted in movement and expressive gesture, distilling influences from jazz, theatre, cinema, dance, and performance—mediums that converge within the language of painting.
Figuration and disfiguration—central concerns in Midões’ work—emerge as themes within a poetic discourse on the human condition, exposing a world and a life in constant transformation. In this light, Things that go away never return unfolds as a vast chess game between strange players, where paintings—both light and dark—become shifting pieces in a labyrinth that alters with every move.
The lighter works, dynamic and energetic, underscore the deconstruction of the figure, populated by peculiar characters whose visceral presence is built up through layers of paint and collage—at times leading towards abstraction. Meanwhile, the darker pieces contain figures that stand apart, opposed to one another, conjuring moments of solitude and introspection, distilled into a more restrained gesture. This duality—akin to a chess match—mirrors the contradiction of emotions, the ambiguity of existence, the very condition of our times.
And just as in an intricate chess game, where every move erases the players, we might ask: who is playing against whom? Artist, individual, poet, dog, elephant, spaceship, spectator—who are we, and who are the others upon this grand stage? What arises from the meeting and the clash of players in this arena-labyrinth where life unfolds with its relentless unpredictability?
The works presented here are bold because they question, they provoke—urging each viewer to take command of their own fate. They confront us with the paradox of what lies beyond our control, yet also with the marvel of what is still to come. In essence, they hold up a mirror to life itself, with all its contradictions, dreams, possibilities, and struggles. And yet, in this great game, there are no winners, no losers—only the encounter with a brave new world, brimming with potential, waiting to be claimed by each and every one of us.
February 2025
João Motta Guedes