So many names at Fundação Carmona e Costa

Solo exhibition curated by Miguel Mesquita at Fundação Carmona e Costa

From May 30 to July 25, 2026

Performances by Beatriz Marques Dias and Francisco Rôlo on May 30th at 12, and on June 20th at 5pm

Project supported by DGArtes

Text from the curator Miguel Mesquita

SO MANY NAMES

To name is an act of power and surrender. When we name something, we reduce it to something recognisable, classifiable, something that can be said in a single word. However, there are things and situations that resist that act. That make it impossible. That bring us back to the question preceding the answer. 
Luísa Jacinto’s work has developed as an exploration of various limits: the expressive limits of painting; the limits of what a surface can be; the limits of what a space can contain. That process becomes the subject of So Many Names. Not as a declaration of crisis, but as the affirmation of a freedom: the freedom to exist between categories, to inhabit ambiguity with precision.
The pieces in this exhibition take on various forms across the space. They are paintings, but they are also sculptures, installations, ephemeral architectures, even atmosphere. To name them as any one of these things in particular would be both correct and insufficient. Translucence is key here: through each surface, other surfaces, other planes of colour and light, can be seen, creating a depth that is not illusory but real. Space multiplies, planes overlap, and our gaze is led to dwell within an image that never closes in on itself. This is the sort of painting that can never be fully seen at once. Its scale demands movement: the viewer walks, wanders, returns. The image is constructed through fragments, through memory and attention, like reading. When we read a book, we do not attach equal weight to every word, but construct meaning through selection, rhythm, and the memory of what has gone before. When we re-read, we find another book. These paintings work in the same way: the image we construct of them is always partial, always personal, always a work in progress. 
While writing about Fra Angelico, Georges Didi-Huberman distinguished between what is seen and what is shown, between the visible and the visual. The pieces by Luísa Jacinto contain that same tension: the light and colour that traverse them are experienced, rather than simply perceived. The light does more than illuminate the paintings – it transforms them, causing them to disappear and reappear, changing their presence in the room. Painting expands beyond its supports: the formal elements that compose it migrate to the room’s walls, appearing on them in dark hues, like cast shadows or the memory of a form that was once somewhere and has left a mark. The carefully prepared lighting mixes those painted shadows with the real ones, to the point that distinguishing between them becomes irrelevant. The whole space becomes pictorial space, as the boundaries between the pieces and their surroundings are dissolved by the combined action of colour and light, somewhat akin to what happens in the work of Ann Veronica Janssens, where perceptual conditions are altered to the point that it is impossible to clearly separate the works from the space. Rather than being there, painting happens there.
The free-standing cylinders that inhabit the same space pose a further question. Made of resin-hardened colour threads, they are at once line and volume, painting process and object in the space, neither paintings nor sculptures but rather something that preserves the logic of one without being bound by the form of the other. Their presence in the space also has a luminescent quality: individually lighted, their shadows prolong their shape beyond its physical limits, multiplying them and fusing them with the surrounding space. Within the exhibition as a whole, these and other pieces interlock with one another, turning what was once an autonomous object into a layer of an image in a state of constant recomposition. 
They also contain an architectural dimension. To some extent, they bring to the field of painting what Le Corbusier’s pilotis brought to the wall: they free the colour from the support, giving it its own presence in space. Plus, by matching the room's height, they define a human measure within a space dominated by large-scale surfaces. They are a vertical scansion, a rhythm that both anchors the space and traverses it.
A performative element, which makes its first appearance in Luísa Jacinto’s work, stems from a deliberate engagement with the human body in motion, a relationship that the scale of the paintings already evoked – works of this size cannot be fully seen without physical movement on the part of the viewer, who, while doing so, realises that their own body is an active part of the experience. According to Merleau-Ponty, the body was not an object in space but that which organises space; the body as a structure through which all perception is directed. Viewing these paintings is an inescapably corporeal experience: the image you construct depends on where you are standing, how you move, and how long you linger. The performers make this visible and bring it to our attention. Their movement through the space does more than merely illustrate the works – it creates, for the observer, a narrative of the experience of inhabiting them, while adding something that the gaze alone cannot achieve: a body language that engages with the language of the expanded paintings, making the relationship between the human scale and the scale of the works intelligible.
In 1967, Michael Fried stated, somewhat critically, that certain works had introduced into the aesthetic experience a dimension that was supposedly foreign to it: that of duration, of physical presence, of what he called theatricality. What Fried considered a deviation was acknowledged by contemporary artistic practice as a condition – and, in some cases, a raw material. The performative element in So Many Names stems precisely from the acknowledgment that works of this scale make demands on the time and body of their viewers, and that making that explicit by giving it form and intent is justified by artistic earnestness. Trisha Brown, who spent decades exploring the relationship between the body in motion and the architecture of the space, has shown that movement through the space is not solely physical, but also compositional in nature: the body in motion is constructing an image, establishing connections between elements, and producing meaning from a sequence of viewpoints that no single fixed gaze can achieve. It is through that tradition that the performative element finds its place here, making us aware of what the gaze does silently. 
So Many Names. They are so many because no single one is enough, not due to any insufficiency in the work, but rather because of its refusal to be held back. Multiplicity is not indefiniteness, but rather a condition: that which exists across multiple registers refuses univocity as impoverishing, while simultaneously offering itself as an open field. It is in this openness that its freedom lies, as well as that of those who move through it.

Miguel Mesquita
 
So Many Names began in 2025, when it was presented for the first time at Córtex Frontal, in Arraiolos. A twenty-four-metre-long painting on translucent fabric ran through the rooms of the space at a constant height, starting seventy centimetres above the floor and going down the stairs to emerge in the outdoor garden at a height of three metres and seventy centimetres. The viewers’ movement through the space did not go around the work, causing them instead to become more and more immersed in its depth. The outline of this piece, shown in the present exhibition, is the result of its insertion in the original architecture, and the painting itself developed out of its interaction with natural elements during the original exhibition period. In its second presentation, at the Francisco Tavares Proença Júnior Museum, in Castelo Branco, as part of the Singular festival, the piece was shown in a new spatial context and confronted for the first time with the presence of the performers, exploring the issues of the painting’s self-visibility and its capacity to visually permeate space. This exhibition marks the project’s third stage, bringing together the lines of research that lie at its source and building on them.

All images © António Jorge Silva