TRIBUTE: Lucid Reverie

The result of an 18-month research process, the group exhibition “Lucid Reverie” maps out some of the most significant contemporary artistic practices in Portugal and acts as a platform to enhance their visibility on the international stage. Spanning sculpture and painting, as well as photography, moving image and text-based work, the project brings together works by 20 artists and artist duos from different generations and with diverse approaches.

By Efi MIchalarou
Photo: Galeria Municipal do Porto Archive

“Lucid Reverie” offers just a glimpse into a much larger and ongoing journey. The exhibition grew out of an invitation to explore the Portuguese art scene and to spotlight artists with strong, consistent practices who, despite the depth and quality of their work, remain largely under-recognized on the international stage. What visitors see here is only a fragment: a curated constellation of works that span generations, disciplines, and media. But we call it a fragment because so much of the project lives outside the gallery walls—in the conversations, the studio visits, the relationships formed, and the ideas that continue to ripple outward. The curators began their research in Porto in April 2024. They met with artists born and raised in Portugal, artists from abroad who now call Portugal home, and Portuguese artists living elsewhere who remain deeply connected to their roots. Over several months, the curators visited nearly 100 studios, engaging in in-depth conversations about life as an artist in Portugal today—the challenges, the inspirations, and the evolving landscape of contemporary art. These visits allowed the curators to develop a rich, first-hand understanding of the scene—one that is deeply informed by the voices and experiences of the artists themselves. Following this immersive research, 20 Portuguese artists were invited to participate in the exhibition. The resulting presentation foregrounds a dialogue between artists whose practices reflect the urgent realities of our time – ecological crisis, identity, memory, and postcolonial legacy – while at the same time allowing space for ambiguity, sensorial experience and speculation. The aim of bringing these diverse pieces together is not to define the Portuguese art scene as such, but to highlight points of connection among distinct voices and invite new perspectives, emotions and ways of being.

Ana  Vidigal’s artistic practice spans painting, collage, assemblage, and installation,  with  research  centred  on  memory,  history, and the reconfiguration of both personal and collective narratives to generate critical new readings in the present. Vidigal’s visual language is one of layering and often incorporates found materials, transforming the act of collecting into a form of storytelling. Employing techniques of cutting and pasting, her compositions juxtapose the past and the present, the public and the private, the personal and the political. André Sousa’s expanded painting practice moves between sculpture and installation, abstraction and representation, and is part of a broader spatial and conceptual investigation that also engages with art history, mythology, and literature, as well as how images and abstract gestures accumulate meaning over time. For this exhibition, Sousa has created Apex, a towering structure in the form of a pyramid that reaches up to the ceiling of the Galeria. While monumental in scale, it also embodies the fragile qualities of a makeshift shelter, a recurring theme in the artist’s work. With a practice focused mainly on sculpture, Andreia Santana’s works are often marked by a minimalist approach that values form and texture, incorporating movement and action through the performativity of materials. Her sculptures tend to convey a sense of fragility and vulnerability while expressing a poetic force. Constantly experimenting with glass and associating the material with iron, fragility, ephemerality, and lightness are some of her central interests as a visual artist. Belén Uriel’s practice is informed by the quotidian and our relationship to what she calls “universal” objects, and the concept of transformation, both in terms of meaning and materiality. By fragmenting and remodelling industrially produced items, her works deconstruct and rethink the social and cultural history of objects and our ever-evolving relationship with them. Helmets and backpacks are transformed into organic forms and beings, resulting in a hybrid between the known and the unknown, use and disuse, reality and fiction. Dayana Lucas’s work explores the intersection between drawing, sculpture, and spatial experience, treating artistic practice as both a physical and conceptual process. In this flow the act of drawing emerges as a form of invocation — an extension of movement, rhythm, and presence — offering unusual ways to engage with space through lines, markings, and erasures that suggest both presence and absence. Usually implicit, the body literally reappears in her photography work, where natural marks are combined with marks that adorn the skin.

Francisco Trêpa’s work is characterized by a ceramic experimentation through different scales and chromatic explorations. Far from explicitly representing an animal or being studied scientifically, it is difficult not to look at his creations and not associate them with the many natural things that surround us. His previous works have already echoed flowers, larvae, eggs, and eggplants. Still, in his production and the one present in this exhibition, the certainty about the references to his ceramics is more blurred. Thorns, folds, and pores, sometimes in contrasting colours, are the basis of his research. Working with sculpture and installation, Gonçalo Sena’s research addresses notions of identity, memory, and the relationship between human beings and the surrounding space. In this exhibition, the artist continues his interest in working with water in installation works and invites the public to enjoy it through the water’s sight, tactile stimulus and sound. Sitting on a bench designed by the artist, the viewer observes this kind of anticlimactic fountain and reflects not only on the limits between sculpture, installation, and design but also on the constant movement inherent in the dynamics of life. Ilídio Candja has extensive experience with painting and drawing. Playing with different scales that approach the monumental, the artist’s images are characterized by a texture that suggests the collage and the friction of elements extracted from different contexts, embodied on the same surface. For this exhibition, presents the installation “Ujamaa,” which plays with the word from the Makonge language – spoken in southern Tanzania and northern Mozambique – that can be translated as union, unity, and/or family. By using this word as a title, Candja reflects on the idea of unity in his work and in his approach to thinking about painting in series. Joana Escoval’s research addresses the intersection between space, matter, and sensory perception. Using various media, including installation, sculpture, and drawing, Escoval creates experiences that invite the viewer to interact and reflect on the space they occupy and her works often suggest transformations of different scales in the exhibition space. As in the works selected for this exhibition, many of her works are composed of simple lines that suggest spirals, asterisks, and other forms, showing the viewer the importance of agglutination and dispersion in the visual arts and life. Dedicating himself exclusively to painting, João Gabriel explores the complexity of identities and human relationships, often incorporating elements that resonate with queer narratives and their nuances; the human figures in his paintings are usually depicted as if they were in a state of suspension. Like frames taken from a film — a working method that the artist used for part of his career — the figures in his images suggest interruptions in actions that leave the viewer full of doubts. Whether in sexual acts, intimacy, or contexts that seem to surround flirting and cruising, his images exude desire but also retraction.

Hoão Pedro Vale and Nuno Alexandre Ferreira’s collaborative practice explores themes of identity, popular culture, history, and social constructs. Employing a multidisciplinary approach, their work often blends elements of fiction and reality to challenge dominant narratives, reclaim marginalized histories, and provoke discussions on belonging, resistance, and social transformation. “Climacz” revisits the first public Gay Pride celebration in Portugal in 1995, focusing on the now legendary party that took place at the Climacz nightclub in Lisbon. More than a tribute, this installation is a meditation on the intersection of art, activism, and LGBTQIA+ history, affirming the power of communal spaces in fostering resistance, expression, and queer identity. Mané Pacheco’s research is marked by creating organic elements and diverse textures, creating compositions that evoke nature and urban culture. This fusion of influences allows her pieces to interact with the surrounding environment, endorsing their site-specific character and highlighting the versatility of Pacheco’s practice, where the desire to create a formal and material vocabulary expands and escapes repetition. Violence, seduction, and fetish go hand in hand in a visual aspect that invites us to dwell on its details, appealing to the human senses in such a way that the desire to touch these pieces becomes inevitable. Mariana Caló & Francisco Queimadela are an artistic duo whose work is centered on the audiovisual media and its many repercussions in related media. Their practice explores the limits between the body and the landscape, always in a broad reading key where words usually play an important role in the viewer’s enjoyment. In “Phantom Flower,” the artists play with the silhouettes of different flowers and their phantasmatic characters endorsed by black-and-white projections made with slides. Floating in space, these images invite us to consider the relationships between anatomy, botany, and zoology beyond their scientific limits. Sara Bichão’s practice is infused with empathy and care. Made with found and repurposed materials, her sculptures are lovingly assembled to form new relationships between objects that transcend time, as well as social and cultural constructs. Each piece is a patchwork of assorted materials, interwoven with a layering of their varied histories, which are strengthened by their togetherness. Although the objects and forms in her sculptures may at times be recognizable, their thoughtful reworking conjures otherworldly imaginaries, transporting us to a mythical realm where hierarchies dissolve and new characters and energies emerge. Working across painting, drawing, video, and installation, Sara Chang Yan’s artistic practice is a contemplation of space, form, and perception. Her works are delicate choreographies of geometries arranged with playful precision and subtle gestures that capture the synergies between presence and absence, transparency and opacity in which negative space takes on equal importance as the forms that occupy the canvas. Yan is an orchestrator of forms, situating elements in dialogue with one another and their surroundings, including light, shadow, air, and the viewer—all becoming integral to the meaning of her works and activating our own sensorial engagement with space.

Silvestre Pestana’s practice spans poetry, performance, video, and digital media. Working with experimental literature and its visual and technological explorations, His works challenge conventions, questioning the relationship between language, the body, and new media. Visual poetry has been at the core of his practice, where he has deconstructed language and experimented with typography, creating compositions that blurred the line between writing and image. Amplifying his long-standing interest in words and cybernetics, Terras Raras consists of 7 commercial LED panels where illuminated words flash across the screens in vivid colors and bold designs, serving as prompts for reflection. Time is a significant protagonist in Sofia Borges’) filmmaking, where moments with no spoken words hold as much weight as those with speech. The films “53” and “Súlu S’Aua” (The Water Spirit) navigate the intricate layers of colonial history on the island of São Tomé and Príncipe, specifically tackling the enduring trauma of the Batepá Massacre. Her works are acts of resistance that employ unconventional narratives and cinematic gestures that reclaim agency, resituate historical trauma, and emphasize the persistence of memory in looking at the past, while also helping to shape the present and future. Working exclusively with painting, Teresa Murta’s works invite long contemplations. Dealing with varied scales, the artist is interested in creating images permeated by mystery that do not deliver any literalness to the viewer’s eyes. In the last years, her compositions have moved from a clear relationship between figure and background, to an apprehension of the surface of the canvas where everything seems more flat and connected. If before we saw organic forms that ghostly ended with identifiable objects on a background of another tone, now we notice a greater abruptness in her brushstrokes and an interest in creating clouds of color with a detail never seen before. Tiago Madaleno’s artistic practice is research-based and furthered by an endless exercise of free associations. Ivy has been a symbol of intellectual achievement since Roman times and is also associated with fidelity and eternal life and is the central element in the installation “Autumn Correspondences”. In the plant world, it is known for its rapid growth and its ability to traverse barriers such as walls or fences. This ability to travel and transcend worlds is precisely why Madaleno is interested in ivy and uses it as a metaphor to reflect on ideals, lost landscapes, obsessions, and desires for escapism. Tiago Mestre’s research has an experimental and investigative approach, where he investigates the properties of materials and how they relate to space and the viewer. Mestre’s works often explore the notion of transience and metamorphosis, using forms that seem to be in constant transformation. This perspective has a poetic character while at the same time provoking an appreciation of the fragility and, often, impermanence of things. Frequently using clay, bronze, and plaster in recent years, his work moves between a direct dialogue with sculpture and modernist traditions of making and showing.

Participating Artists: Ana Vidigal, André Sousa, Andreia Santana, Belén Uriel, Dayana Lucas, Francisco Trêpa, Gonçalo Sena, Ilídio Candja, Joana Escoval, João Gabriel, João Pedro Vale & Nuno Alexandre Ferreira, Mané Pacheco, Mariana Caló & Francisco Queimadela, Sara Bichão, Sara Chang Yan, Silvestre Pestana, Sofia Borges, Teresa Murta, Tiago Madaleno and Tiago Mestre.

Photo: Silvestre Pestana, Terras Raras, 2022

Info: Curators: Hiuwai Chu and Raphael Fonseca, Galeria Municipal do Porto, Rua D. Manuel II, Jardins do Palácio de Cristal, Porto, Portugal, Duration: 12/7-12/10/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.galeriamunicipaldoporto.pt/