The Rui Freire Gallery – Fine Art presents "On Paper, 1953 - 2025," a collective exhibition that investigates the multiple potentialities of paper as a material, support, and territory for artistic experimentation. Between inscription and erasure, fragility and resistance, opacity and transparency, paper reveals itself here not only as a means of recording but as an active space for formal and conceptual articulation.
The exhibition gathers works by Manuel Caldeira, Jean-Charles de Ravenel, Jorge Nesbitt, Pedro Quintas, Roberto Ruspoli, Bruno Castro Santos, Hanns Schimansky, Bela Silva, Vieira da Silva, Loló Soldevilla and Arpad Szenes, with the special participation of Pedro Casqueiro, Daniela Krtsch, and Cristina Lamas. Spanning a temporal arc from 1953 to 2025, this selection of artists highlights the plasticity of paper and its ability to adapt to different languages, practices, and gesturalities.
Far from a mere technical or chronological survey, "On Paper, 1953 - 2025" proposes a journey that unveils the malleability of this support and its successive reconfigurations. From geometric compositions to intuitive strokes, from graphic subtlety to unexpected volume, the presented works expand the limits of paper, integrating processes that tear, fold, overlap, or dematerialize it.
By questioning the relationship between material and concept, manual skill and symbolic construction, the exhibition challenges conventional notions of paper as a means of expression. In this territory of constant transformation, memory and erosion coexist, structure and instability dialogue, and the support, far from being neutral, assumes a dynamic role in the construction of visual discourse.
"On Paper, 1953 - 2025" invites the visitor to experience paper beyond its physicality, as a space in continuous mutation, where gesture and material meet in a permanent tension between permanence and ephemerality.
