2026

Is the future an accumulation of past events realized in a coming present, or is it an absolute void that opens up and is filled with absolute novelty? Does it correspond to a materialization of an absolute past, or instead to an immanence, to the fact that its non-existence is yet to be inaugurated? This is a simple digression. It is a question of being: does being (and the future) correspond to a repetition of what one already has been at another moment (that difference, perhaps), or does it amount to an accumulation of novelties?

Ál Varo Tavares de Guilherme (Luanda, Angola, 1992) and Márcio Carvalho (Lagos, Portugal, 1981) embody two important instances of this tension. Tavares de Guilherme's painting uses abstraction to propose an itinerary for unfolding. It avoids figuration, penetrates invisible spaces, and compiles a mythology that stages passage and calling. Carvalho's work, in contrast, often points to the past—not as just remembrance or evocation, but as a conversation starter. He seeks to make visible memories that history omitted. These are two visions of the future, in short.

Memory is important, however. There is no history without memory. And without history, there is no future. Is it inevitable to give in completely to the former, though? Can one be anything other than the history one is forced to live in? A concrete example: Tavares de Guilherme was born in Angola, a country still dealing with a civil war that followed the liberation war that took Carvalho's family to Portugal, the country from which Angola was seeking to free itself. Carvalho repeatedly refers back to this history in his works, pointing directly to memory and its conditions of possibility and context as a form of identity production, highlighting its shortcomings and the narratives that determine it. Tavares de Guilherme favors abstraction (the opposite of biography?). Are they both talking about the same thing in this mismatch?

Tavares de Guilherme repeatedly sketches a form of unfolding, often working with variations of the same image. The style is somewhat fleeting, sometimes frugal, sometimes generous, ultimately a little bit of everything—something of curiosity, a certain why not. It is this panoply of worlds that shooting in the dark (2024 -) brings together, preserving the immediacy that drawing allows. Sometimes more confessional, at times almost domestic, the imagery also wavers between minimalism and luxuriousness, resisting an architecture of rigid boundaries. Narcissus (2026-) reduces this universe to light traces of gray. Only in the mirror does color become pronounced. Color appears in the space where the image overlaps itself.

At first glance, Carvalho's approach seems radically opposite. His series of works in Capulana, Memories for 14 busts (2022), for example, seems to serve mainly the purpose of evoking the busts that are still today in the Tropical Garden of Belém, representing what Henrique Galvão (curator of the colonial section of the 1940 ‘Portuguese World Exhibition’) called “races of the empire.” However, their juxtaposition with shipwreck scenes painted in cobalt blue—an almost institutional color in the Portuguese ceramic universe—opens up a space of ambiguity, even iconoclasm. In this case, it pries open a space of fear and disorientation, calling into question the univocality of a history made up of romantic heroes and conquerors.

The Era of Involuntary Memory (2015-) outlines a similar itinerary, also based on this principle of contrast and juxtaposition. In the archival photographs, the features are once again superimposed by overprints of tile motifs depicting episodes from the Portuguese historical imagination (does a country remember? What?). In the series, the face functions as a canvas, a portal of identity that blends with its own historical dimension. This is an occupation of various memorial spaces, but above all, it is a claim of opacity: the claim  to remain partially unintelligible, resisting reduction, assimilation, and the colonial demand for transparency.

How can one inaugurate a future based on memory, though? Forgetting? What if the past is painful? Does forgetfulness take many forms? Can remembrance heal? How can one live anew, beyond the sensation of living again? Or: how can one turn this distance into a dialogue? Carvalho recalls Edouard Glissant, but more importantly, he resembles Tavares de Guilherme in the way he uses abstraction to seize the future while seeming to point to the past. After all, the past accumulates lived futures, traces of a biography, but the future is not just a repetition of that accumulated time. Who—and how?—decides when time becomes fixed, rather than just flowing? The future must be possible.


written for ‘multiple biography’