O Banquete (1)

 

 

There is, in the act of gathering, a founding dimension of human experience: sharing.

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O Banquete (1) proposes itself as an exhibition device that activates this condition, unfolding around a continuous table — horizontal, extended, insistent — on which the works are arranged as elements within a shared field. This gesture is not merely formal; it is structural. The table, as both support and metaphor, establishes a condition of proximity and circulation, resisting the notion of the isolated artwork in favour of an ecology of relations. As in a banquet, what is at stake is not only presentation, but participation: for a banquet is not simply a meeting, but also exuberance, generosity, and a temporary suspension of measure — making the act of looking situated, implicated, and shared.

 

The eleven artists brought together here were selected through an open call that received 96 submissions, revealing a broad panorama of emerging practices and contemporary modes of thinking and making. The works presented — spanning sculpture, installation, drawing and photography — form a heterogeneous constellation, traversing diverse materialities and approaches to shaping the sensible.

 

The selection process did not seek stylistic or thematic unity, but rather a productive tension between differences, brought together by artistic quality — a group of voices capable of sustaining, simultaneously, autonomy and permeability.

 

The table as a device reconfigures — or diverts — the traditional logic of exhibition-making as a linear or compartmentalised sequence. By inscribing all works within a shared plane, it proposes a non-hierarchical reading in which the path is not prescribed, but constructed by the viewer. The physical proximity between works intensifies the potential for propagation: forms, gestures and concepts resonate across one another, giving rise to unexpected continuities or abrupt ruptures.

 

In this sense, the exhibition operates as an expanded field of relations, where meaning does not reside solely within each work, but emerges in the interval — in proximity, in adjacency, in the in-between.

 

The title of the exhibition directly references Plato’s Symposium, where multiple discourses on love intertwine to form a plural reflection on what moves desire and shapes existence. Within this framework, love appears as a mediating force between the sensible and the intelligible, between the human and the divine — an energy that propels movement towards Beauty.

 

It is also within this text that the idea emerges that human beings are endowed with fertility, not only of the body but of the spirit. This intellectual fertility manifests as the capacity to generate forms, ideas and images — to produce Beauty as the expression of a thinking that is itself sensorial.

 

It is important, however, to acknowledge that the nature of Beauty escapes its own definition.

 

The Beautiful resists stable categorisation and cannot be reduced to demonstrable logic. It is an ineffable experience, one that eludes language and exceeds any attempt at discursive explanation. More than an object of knowledge, Beauty is a form of intuitive apprehension — an intensity that manifests beyond empirical observation and conceptual reasoning. It cannot be explained; it imposes itself as experience, as immediate recognition, even if difficult to name.

 

In this context, the works gathered in O Banquete (1) may be understood as manifestations of this fertility of the spirit. Each embodies a singular gesture — an attempt to give form to thought, to materialise an intuition, to render visible or sensible that which inherently escapes. Yet, when placed in relation, these singularities cease to operate autonomously, becoming part of a broader field of meaning. What emerges is not a sum of parts, but an open and unstable system, in which Beauty is produced through relation: between works, between artists, and between them and the bodies that encounter them.

 

The exhibition thus proposes a reconfiguration of the position of the viewer: no longer an external observer, but a presence inscribed within the relational field of the exhibition. In approaching the table, the visitor becomes part of an experience that is at once aesthetic and relational — an exercise in sustained attention, in visual listening, in openness to encounter: with the other, with multiplicity, with the indeterminate.

 

More than presenting a set of works, O Banquete (1) unfolds as a space of shared presence and sensorial exchange. A place where time thickens, where the gaze lingers, and where thought — as in Plato’s proposition — opens itself to the possibility of generating, even if only provisionally, forms of Beauty.

 

 

Mercedes Cerón, April 2026