Salgadeiras Contemporary Art is pleased to present Festina lente, the first solo exhibition by Portuguese artist Rita Magalhães at the gallery. Opening on November 27, from 6 PM to 9 PM, the exhibition introduces a new body of work in which Magalhães continues her exploration of photographic materiality, light, and the transformative power of images. The title, meaning “make haste slowly,” sets the tone for a project built on deliberate slowness, heightened attention, and the poetic tension between urgency and contemplation.

In Festina lente, Magalhães expands her ongoing investigation of photography as both medium and subject. Her works often begin with appropriated imagery and are then subjected to processes of layering, chemical intervention, and chromatic manipulation. The resulting compositions oscillate between illusion and physicality, revealing surfaces that appear to vibrate, dissolve, or shimmer. Through this meticulous process, Magalhães questions the stability of the photographic image and places emphasis on transformation — not as an end, but as a visual and conceptual state in itself.

The exhibition invites viewers to engage with a set of images that resist immediate interpretation and instead reward slow looking. The works presented in Festina lente blur the boundaries between photography, painting, and installation, creating a sensory field in which perception becomes elastic. By foregrounding time, fragility, and the alchemy of photographic construction, Rita Magalhães offers an intimate reflection on how images are formed, deformed, and ultimately reborn. Festina Lente marks an important milestone in the artist’s practice and a significant contribution to contemporary photographic experimentation.

In Rita Magalhães’ photographs, her selective gaze frames a landscape filtered through a black mirror that softens it, making it less immediate and more deliberate.

This attention to the way perception is transformed internally makes her images heirs to German Romanticism, where the contemplation of nature leads to the feeling of the sublime.

(Manuela Hargreaves, in Folha de Sala)