You tapped me on the shoulder and ran away

João R. Ferreira, Patrícia Mariano, Paula López-Bravo, Paulo Albuquerque & Vasco Maio

25.06.2026 ------> 30.09.2026

The title refers to a childhood game of interruption and disappearance: tapping someone on the shoulder and vanishing before they can react. The exhibition takes this gesture as a starting point, bringing together practices that move across memory, fiction, landscape, and emotional experience. Rather than a shared theme, the artists are connected by an interest in what appears in partial, unstable, or interrupted forms.

Between archive and fiction, João R. Ferreira constructs fragmented narratives in which image and memory are continuously reconfigured, while Paulo Albuquerque draws from everyday life to create dense compositions built through layering and rhythm.

Vasco Maio develops distilled landscapes centred on horizon, light, and atmosphere, while within the same field of relations between figuration and imagination, Patrícia Mariano works with symbolic images that oscillate between reality and fantasy. Paula López-Bravo, meanwhile, moves between abstraction and figuration, using colour and gesture to construct a sensitive spatial field.

Despite their formal differences, the five artists converge in an attention to interval and suspension. The works function as brief apparitions, between presence and disappearance.