What is gathered is the residue of a working life and its encounters. More than five hundred graphic diaries kept since adolescence. Encaustic paintings in which line has long since overtaken mass. Printer's trays filled with wax. Ceramics, plaster pieces and small objects from other artists, arrived through gift or exchange in the course of residencies. A suspended marionette, brushes, a votive offering.

And a painter's ladder, still marked with paint, standing at the centre and resting against the largest canvas, where a stencilled line reads that the cry caught in the throat no longer escapes. A ladder is, by long tradition, the way to heaven, and this one has been turned upside down. In Borges, objects ask for no other world. Inverted, it becomes the ladder of someone who no longer needs to climb. Two objects carry their own word, inscribed. SOUL, on the solid crown of a hat, and LOVE, on a gilded frame that once belonged to the artist's mother. These are not captions. They are what each object, once, chooses to say about the person who kept it.

Humour and gravity share the space without asking permission. Door knockers shaped like small hands invite one to knock on God's door, monkeys bring their Creator to trial, and a freedom paid for dearly is still remembered. The memory deposited here feeds feeling and recollection, but not, necessarily, saudade.¹

Shown alongside Metamorfoses, by Luísa Ferreira, where photography absorbs the very time of its making, this wall proposes the duration of things at rest. Whoever approaches finds no archive. They find objects that, with no saudade of their own, keep saying the name of the one who loved them.

¹ Saudade: a Portuguese word with no exact English equivalent, naming a longing for something or someone absent, often without the wish for its return.

Paulo Robalo