3+1 Arte Contemporânea is pleased to announce Desisto – o que não vejo imagino (I give up – what I can’t see I imagine), the latest solo exhibition by Nuno Sousa Vieira (Leiria, 1971) at the gallery.

Nuno Sousa Vieira’s practice is influenced by the artist’s workspace, where the materials, colours and motifs that surround him often become integral part of the artworks. His works combine the research about fundamental questions of the artistic practice, such as shape, volume, spatiality and layering, with intellectual concerns related to contemporary and art history.

In Desisto – o que não vejo imagino, Sousa Vieira establishes a parallelism between the beginning of the 20th century, when the art vanguards dictated the abandonment of figuration in favour of abstraction, with the moment we currently live. The abundance of images and information that surrounds us daily is exacerbated by the growing use of artificial intelligence, which allows anyone to imitate and even make up reality. An abstract language becomes, then, increasingly more important as an answer to this excess of reality (often constructed but seen as true). And just like in the 20th century, this answer is a political act.

Thus, the title of the exhibition implies a refusal to go along with the mechanisms that actively harm the imagination and critical thinking. Desisto (I give up) functions as a scream, a catharsis, the announcement of a decisive action, but not a surrender. Instead, it is an act of resistance that is explained in the second half of the title: the visual is not mandatory, the imaginary does not need to stop being so. More than one hundred years after the stir cause by Kazimir Malevich’s Black square, in its total absence of figuration and narrative, Sousa Vieira reminds us that painting is a place of happenings, and the artist should have something to say with their works.