In this new body of work, Aires Gameiro deepens his ongoing engagement with the hidden, the fleeting, and the colloquial through a series of pieces that dissolve the boundaries between painting and sculpture. Named after idiomatic expressions—often hybrids of several expressions—these works evoke a linguistic proxy that is at once familiar and evasive.

Idioms are perhaps the closest linguistic form to gossip: suggestive, ambiguous, and charged with meanings accessible only to those already initiated. To strand while watching ships sail by. To have a flea behind one’s ear. To rest in the shade of a banana tree. None of it is literal. To take it literally is to miss it. Thus, meaning becomes a snare, for what matters is the sense rather than the words. But to grasp it, one must know it beforehand. In the end, it is less a form of communication than a game: an intimate gesture, a private language unlocked through an informal hinge.

This is precisely the terrain in which Gameiro’s works operate. His paintings lean toward the sculptural—more object than image—while his sculptures feel like natural extensions of his paintings. It’s a deft move, aligning his formal trajectory with his conceptual inquiry: each form establishes its own internal logic, appropriating a medium without fully submitting to its conventions, guided by an instinctive grammar rather than a prescribed one. Again: suggestive and ambiguous, both a game and an idiom.