Blinded by the light Group exhibition

Casa da Cultura da Comporta
Rua do Secador 8
7580-648 Comporta
Portugal

Laís Amaral, Paloma Bosquê, Nina Canell, Rodrigo Cass, João Maria Gusmão, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, Marina Perez Simão, Leticia Ramos, Mauro Restiffe, Marina Rheingantz, Maaike Schoorel, Pol Taburet, Antonio Tarsis, Janaina Tschäpe, Erika Verzutti, and Frank Walter. 

Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel and Mendes Wood DM are pleased to present Blinded by the Light, an exhibition that invites reflection on the thresholds where light meets shadow, clarity dissolves, and colour fades. These shifting elements unsettle perceptions while straddling what is neither entirely visible nor entirely hidden. In this liminal space, light and dark are allies rather than opposites in shaping the physical and emotional architecture of life. To be blinded by the light is to be reminded of the fragility in the act of seeing, an act that is never neutral nor a finality. In a world shaped by political instability and environmental collapse, the act of looking comes with a heavier weight, reflections in half-light.

Laís Amaral’s practice is anchored in a space that dialogues between memory, perception, and ecological grief. Using unconventional painting tools, works such as Untitled III (Fecho os olhos, vejo a mata series) (2025) convey marks of Brazil’s rich yet wounded landscapes, reflecting on environmental extractivism. In dialogue with Amaral’s departure from canonical painting traditions, Antonio Tarsis employs everyday materials like matchsticks, packaging, and found scraps. Tarsis builds scenes shaped by both absence and presence: in Untitled (Desert Landscapes) (2025) a dry terrain becomes a quiet symbol of resistance and memory, the desert serving as his central metaphor for endurance, loss, and renewal. 

Erika Verzutti’s practice exists at the intersection between sculpture and painting, natural form and modernism. Beach with Three Suns and Rain (2024) plays with perspective, placing the viewer in the position of a bird flying above a beach. Reliant on natural materials, this familiar yet fictional landscape evokes ecological fragility and becomes a metaphor for memory and transformation, reflecting the poetic tension between permanence and disappearance. Nina Canell andRodrigo Cass both engage with the organic nature of materials. Canell processes resist stability, allowing substances to shift with atmospheric conditions while tracing time’s mark and nature’s quiet labour, like in Moody (2024), where lightning-rod balls capture light’s violent impact on matter. Both artists’ works reveal transformation as a continuous thread, Canell’s weather-marked materials reflect our unchecked resource consumption while Cass’s textural compositions map the boundaries where labour meets the material world.

In Pol Taburet’s Papa Tonnerre’s Tales (2025) the deliberate absence of colour becomes a language: rendered in black and white, these compositions narrate how a community’s memory-keeper turns betrayer in créole lore, creatures gliding from spirit-light to shadow. Meanwhile, Paloma Bosquê’s abstract forms resist narrative interpretation; she plumbs the depth of dark matter to be felt rather than merely seen. Plate (2025) invites us to look beyond the visible and into the atmospheric.

The atmosphere itself serves as Leticia Ramos’s field: through analogue photography and experimental film, she constructs fictional landscapes grounded in scientific imagination. Handmade devices capture not only images but also the shifting moons, mountains, and geological formations; fiction and non-fiction blur, and landscapes unfold as speculative terrains shaped by light and time. Mauro Restiffe’s photographic series attends to everyday interactions framed by illumination, capturing vernacular life through luminous contrasts so that quotidian scenes become unexpected. Ramos and Restiffe find resonance in João Maria Gusmão’s filmic and photographic transformations, where light is both subject and medium: layered, translucent materials subtly reimagine familiar forms while Maaike Schoorel summons ghostly moments from vernacular snapshots, recalling memory’s blur. 

In Marina Perez Simão’s work colour becomes movement: brushstrokes imitate wind and light disperses across the canvas in dynamic rhythms, disrupting, interrupting, and reframing sight. Janaina Tschäpe’s landscapes unfold in continuous metamorphosis; sweeping oil and pastel gestures echo cycles of growth and decay, transforming natural worlds into storytellers. Born to Love (2025) and Clareira (2025) see Marina Rheingantz layer impressions so that flecks of paint become climatic inscriptions, each detail echoing dramatic shifts.

Matthew Lutz-Kinoy’s Mountain and Sea (2018), steeped in deep and pale reds with white, and Frank Walter’s works hymning sea, moon, sun, and Walter’s native Antigua and Barbuda’s ever-shifting trees both offer landscapes where nature still gives and breathes – where colour becomes atmosphere and light moves with care, shaped by sensitivity to the spiritual presence of nature.

Blinded by the Light reminds that hope, care, repair, and connection to the natural world are not only possible but essential to imagining new ways of living, perceiving, and being together.

– Cindy Sissokho