Retomar o Passo

For those who have been following the chronicles that Luísa Salvador has been writing and publishing, there is a disarming simplicity in the poetic observation of the most recurring and everyday evidences, whether in her relationship with nature and the seasons, or in a speculative contemplation of affections and intertwining narratives, all within the trained gaze of someone who perceives the landscape.

The conceptualization of a referential universe runs parallel to a latent search for the enigmatic. A cosmological understanding of the vast is experienced in the minute details of the small. In Luísa Salvador’s work, words are alive and contain images. The images, in turn, are vibrant and occupy places in memory. Fragments, trails, traces, and ruptures have become familiar elements in her lexicon as a visual artist in recent years, stemming from a deep understanding of the temporality of materials and their potential to act within a place. Thinking about the artist and researcher means considering this whole, the inseparable intercommunicating relationships in her practice, which embraces a plural nature with singular contours, like atoms gravitating around the same circumference.

It is in this spirit that we approach her first solo exhibition at the gallery, as an echo of this intricate narrative, inherent to her contemplative, analytical, and necessarily peripatetic disposition, where words take precedence and coexist with drawing, just as the hand that draws is the same that writes. Retomar o Passo emerges precisely from this blurring of stylistic and temporal boundaries, from a need to revisit themes and recontextualize materialities. Setbacks and advances are essential to the editing of writing, just as an obsession with images or visual imaginaries is intrinsic to the studio experience. And in this intersection of word and image, rest and movement, stain or color, we engage with the possible elective triangulations between thought, landscape, and gesture.

Arqueologia da sede, Angústia solar, Sombra sorte, Geologia do saber, O luto das pedras, Palavras por explicar, Escrever sobre a terra que sustenta os nossos passos, O sopro das folhas que não voltam, these are some of the phrases noted in a journal over a hundred-day period preceding the conception of this exhibition. This exercise, both conceptual and methodical, follows a rhythm and synthesis, bringing handwriting to the lower floor of the space. The repeated and erased mark, of varying dimensions, suggests that each formal change corresponds to a map of memories, a reading of representation at a given moment. Here, it is perhaps important to acknowledge the introspective movement that both reveals and confuses, the destinies each passage corresponds to. Through the act of composing and deconstructing its narrative existence into the visual and fictional plan, the work inscribes itself in space. It is at the threshold of exhaustion of the trace that the rigidity of the linguistic system is confronted, or the word is returned to its primordial state.

The works presented on the upper floor, in contrast, take form in their firm silence and evoke the memory of cartographic imagery in drawing, already present in the artist’s previous works, whether in references to desert landscapes or her relationship with the geology of territory. The marking of trails, fictitious surfaces scratched with a blade in meticulous and dynamic gestures. The choice of canvas, as opposed to the artist’s usual approach to paper, elevates the support to its condition as painting, with chromatic contrasts delineating mountains, valleys, rivers—the frontier marked by time or the possibility of flux.

Returning to the beginning, for those who have been following the chronicles that Luísa Salvador has been writing and publishing, there are always circles that touch, cycles that intersect, existences we can speculate upon. Words acquire lives of their own. Memories hold their own images. 

The hand fades its own trace. The story continues. In Retomar o Passo, handwriting becomes a form of inscription not only of words but of pathways, a score that maps the movements of thought and trace. A cartography of affections and displacements, a territory of transgression and experimentation.

Carolina Trigueiros

January, 2025