Loving is a place

There are islands, some barely tiny islets, others larger, archipelagos scattered throughout cities, museums, galleries, beaches filled with art, where you bathe in something more than the daytime water, the rushing, the everyday splash. You stop being carried by the flow, and there, on the shore of a painting, a work of art, you take a dip in light, something fresh that lifts your whole body.

Then the salt grabs you. It bites your skin. Your eyes are sunburned. In Lisbon, you land on a green island called the Gulbenkian Foundation . A marvelous island, with fine sand and pine forests, perched on a rock, all prow-like. And, above, the light of the sky, dragging you along, the sun choking with laughter, crawling everywhere.

This exhibition is one of those that bites. It rips out whatever it can, piece by piece, without mercy. It features the works of two artists. Two women, Paula Rego and Adriana Varejão . One Portuguese, the other Brazilian. Their canvases, open, ripped, whipped bodies, are thrust right into your face. A total of 80 works that don't leave you reeling. Wounded bodies, raw, that strangle your gaze. They leave a harpoon stuck in your eyes, and then you emerge, somewhat dazed, regretting being a man.

Paula Rego's bodies are volumes, breasts, buttocks, viscera, shattered faces, thick eyes that look at you, that don't see you, that pierce you with all the anguish of those who know what it costs to give birth , what it is to have no mercy, what it is to suffer from being that hole that men don't know how to inhabit except with violence , with that merciless fury that, sometimes, some have inside them and expel. Bodies beaten, forced, with viscera that are tiles, or vice versa. There, on the canvases, the entire grammar of disgust, of nausea, something wild, something cannibalistic parades. And so you pass from room to room, from cube to cube, from one wave to the next.

The classrooms are explicit, clinical. There's no room for disguise. There's no space to look away, to not see, to not know: "I was earth, I was womb, I was torn sail," is what they call themselves. Sometimes the sea invites itself without warning, splashing, as in this other room inspired by a poem by Sophia de Mello : "Sea, where I am myself returned in salt, foam, and shell."

And all of this is housed in a luminous building, the work of Japanese architect Kengo Kuma , which just opened in Lisbon. 20,000 square meters inspired by the engawa that connects the exterior and interior, the museum and the garden. Suddenly, you step outside, breathe air, greenery. You take a moment to come back. You recover from the punches to the stomach.

In total, the exhibition took more than three years to prepare. It brings together unique works such as, for example, Paula Rego's painted series, Untitled , about abortion. There you have women with their legs wide open, next to bloody mop buckets. Rego, one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, alongside the other artists of the English School: Freud, Bacon, and Hockney.

The result is overwhelming, more than an exhibition: an atonement. The works stick in your throat, between your teeth: they're difficult to chew and, even more so, impossible to forget. And the sea is always there, the undertow of the waves, the coming and going of art that takes you back to the day, that swallows you up.

Paula Rego left us a while ago, at 87, in 2022. The Lisbon artist passed away in London , where she lived much of her life. A year earlier, the poet Joan Margarit passed away. With both of them, La Cama Sol produced the book Una mujer mayor ( An Older Woman), which was published in 2019, while they were both still alive. Memories are also islands that remain with us, beaches where we can go and return, so as not to forget, so as not to stop living. That's what places do too.

Margarit wrote it in an impossible way: “Love is a place. It endures deep within: it's where we come from. And also the place where life remains.” That's what art does: it fills us with sunshine, with saltiness. It takes us from island to island, from city to city. And then, we carry that inside with us, wherever we go, we carry it, like love.