It was love at first sight. I won’t deny it. In 2021, Fernão Cruz (Portugal, 1995) presented a surprising solo exhibition at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, which immediately revealed him to the public as one of the most promising figures in contemporary Portuguese art. In my case, it was, I repeat, love at first sight. “Morder o Pó” (biting the dust) immediately revealed the technical mastery of the young artist who, using a language that transitions between the surreal and the hyper-real, created a suspenseful narrative that brought together works from different disciplines (mainly painting and sculpture) and integrated the viewer into a kind of fable of the absurd, in which we remained disconsolate, even though our eyes had found Art to its fullest.

It’s impossible to know when dusk will fall, impossible to list all the cases in which consolation will be necessary. Life is not a problem that can be solved by dividing light by darkness or days by nights, but rather an unpredictable journey between places that don’t exist. ¹

Stig Dagerman (Sweden, 1923-1954) lived his short life under the prelude of a terrible restlessness, a fatal anguish. As part of a generation disillusioned with the world’s direction after the Second World War, which criticised the construction of a society marked by false human relations and a discredited regime, the author left us an extensive literary legacy. However, it is in “Our Need for Consolation is Insatiable” (1955) that Dagerman’s melancholic spirit, his Kafkaesque despair and his unshakeable despondency are most evident. A kind of manifesto for a generation, the work brings together his anarchist conviction. It makes him a kind of cult author, one of those who best deconstructs manichaeism and places us in a permanent and timeless limbo.

When we started preparing “Sentinel”, the solo exhibition that Fernão Cruz will be showing at zet gallery from April 24th to June 18th, 2025, after an initial conversation with no end in sight, I went back to Dagerman. There is something profound and permanently unfinished, unheard ofand restless about Fernão Cruz’s work. I came back to understand the principles of “The Open Work”² (1962) by Umberto Eco (Italy, 1932-2016), which affirm this artist not only as an heir to the best of the avant-garde, but as someone who reinvents arte povera, expands painting and the semiotics of the body, redefines the possibilities of assemblage and praises the manual process, experimentation and, at the same time, drawing.

In Fernão Cruz, beyond a merely contemplative dimension, we are challenged to immerse ourselves in a “Brave New World” (1932), the one that Aldous Huxley (United Kingdom, 1894-1963) advocated, and which also made him the voice of a generation of disillusioned people, this time with the fallacy of the promise of the triad “community, identity, stability”:

What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when the anthrax bombs are popping all around you? That was when science first began to be controlled– after the Nine Years’ War. People were ready to have even their appetites controlled then. Anything for a quiet life. We’ve gone on controlling ever since. It hasn’t been very good for truth, of course. But it’s been very good for happiness. One can’t have something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for. You’re paying for it, Mr. Watson–paying because you happen to be too much interested in beauty. I was too much interested in truth; I paid too.³

In the attention we have paid to the artist, we have observed the evolution of his artistic production, always taking as its starting point a process of experimentation with different materials and technologies, which make him move between figurative expression in three-dimensional formats and total freedom of expression and non-representation in two-dimensional ones. In his constant use of assemblage and, in the specific case of “Sentinel”, clothing and other textile formats, references to Michelangelo Pistoletto (Italy, 1933) are inevitable, although Fernão Cruz is less interested in a political or politicised view of his work and even less interested in presenting narratives that are rushed or simplified by causal judgements. In Fernão Cruz. and in “Sentinel”, there is always more to uncover than what is uncovered, and the artist is not interested in providing tight readings, but rather in appealing to the imagination and the intersection of visions.

At zet gallery, we are exhibiting a set of eight works conceived as a unique installation that unfolds from a questioning of our collective unconscious, our individual memories and the process of constructing archetypes that guide social behaviour and limit our freedoms, using the reflections of Carl Gustav Jung (Switzerland, 1875-1961) as the foundation:

If it were permissible to personify the unconscious, we might call it a collective human being combining the characteristics of both sexes, transcending youth and age, birth and death, and, from having at his command a human experience of one or two million years, almost immortal.
(...)
In view of these facts, we must assert that the unconscious contains not only components of a personal nature, but also impersonal and collective ones, in the. form of inherited categories or archetypes. I have previously suggested that the unconscious, in its deeper layers, contains contents of a collective nature, in a relatively active state; for this reason, I have called it the collective unconscious. ⁴

“Sentinel” by Fernão Cruz is, in this sense, an unpredictable journey to childhood or to a prototype of childhood, thought of as a dive into a dream and offering us a constant tension between reality and fiction, fragility and strength, between what is intimate and what is public. It is in the certainty of this collective unconscious, of these patterns that we inherit and perpetuate, that we freeze our hypotheses and allow ourselves to be trapped in the past, in melancholy and doubt. “Sentinel” is not catharsis or psychoanalysis, but it demands more of us than a simple wander. It asks us to do more than just contemplate, without literal activism, but with social and, above all, emotional involvement.

An immense blue surrounds a set of eight works that present themselves as a common body that recovers identities, memories and, above all, dreams, in a constant dialogue between opposites and metaphors that the artist accentuates in his nominal poetics. “O Malabarista Anestesiado” (The Anaesthetised Juggler) (2023) and “Abismo” (Abyss) (2023) welcome us and, from the outset, introduce us to the importance of process for this artist; of the paper he works to acquire the rigidity of stone, building characters and rhythms interrupted by questions and answers.

“Impossível” (Impossible) (2025) maintains the papier-mâché palette and adds to the enigma of everyday life, without answers, without consolation. Drops collected by a pair of hands emerge from a sack, a pocket of sorts, as if it were possible to store rain or collect blood. “Voo Explosão” (Flight Explosion) (2025) doesn’t happen by chance, and the canvases of the last two years in fact mark an explosion, an extension of the artist into mirror-space. The enormous material density and the inevitable figurative references, marked by verticals, clouds, wind scratches, enhance the connection with a universe of colour, maintained in the clarity of “Um Dia” (One Day) (2025) and expanded in “Nocturno” (Nocturnal) (2025), where the assemblage dominates and makes “Espera” (Waiting) (2025) the central element of this “anti-narrative” of objects. Fernão Cruz includes bronze, creating a contrast of forces with the paper pulp and the clothes-sculptures, questioning us about weakness and strength, fullness and emptiness, accumulation and detachment.

The characters in “Sentinela” (Sentinel) (2025) watch over us, put us on guard, keep watch, like the story that Sérgio Godinho (Portugal, 1949) tells us in “Balada da Rita” (Rita’s Balad) (1978):

They told me one day, Rita (be on guard)
I warn you, life is tough (be on guard)
clench both fists and walk (be on guard)
and I said goodbye to misfortune
and set out on an adventure
and here I am, the one who spoke ⁵

In “Sentinel”, everyone is (we are) on guard, watching, paying attention, beyond contemplation. Coincidence or not, this exhibition opens on April 24th, 2025, the night before the ‘first full and clean day’, as Sophia de Mello Breyner (Portugal, 1919-2004) defined it, the day of the Revolution that changed us, that made us free. In this time that seems to us to be the return of all fears, this 2025 hampered by hatred, in which regressions, losses of rights, freedoms and guarantees are fuelled, this exhibition by Fernão Cruz and these characters are also a warning. That’s why the exhibition and the hypothetical route we’re proposing end with questions and an invitation to see again, to go back to the beginning.

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^{[1] DAGERMAN, Stig – Our Need for Consolation is Insatiable. VascoSantos Editor & Norstedts Forlag, 1989. Page 19.}

^{[2] ECO, Umberto – The Open Work. Relógio d’Água, 2016.}

^{[3] HUXLEY, Aldous – Brave New World. Antígona, 2013. Page 270.}

^{[4] JUNG, C. G. – Estudos de Psicologia Analítica. Vozes, 1978. Pages 127 - 128.}

^{[5] Free translation of the original song, present in the Portuguese text.}

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