Drawing Room Lisboa 2026: Archipelago, a group show by António Faria, Gabriel Garcia and Paulo Albuquerque aka Cesáh for Drawing Room Lisboa 2026

For Drawing Room Lisboa 2026, THIS IS NOT A WHITE CUBE presents Archipelago, a curated selection of works by the contemporary artists António Faria, Gabriel Garcia and Paulo Albuquerque aka Cesáh, whose practices explore questions of displacement, belonging and the construction of subjectivity through physical, emotional and digital geographies.

Bringing together drawing, painting, installation and digital media, the project proposes the archipelago as a conceptual model through which to consider forms of relation shaped by distance, memory and interconnection. Far from a strictly geographical reading, the archipelago emerges as a dynamic structure in which autonomous elements coexist, communicate and generate new meanings. Through distinct artistic languages, the three artists explore transitional spaces and states of suspension, reflecting on how we inhabit territories marked by mobility, instability and a multiplicity of experiences.

Gabriel Garcia’s work emerges from the experience of inhabiting and moving between insular and continental territories, reflecting on the non-place as an existential condition of contemporary life. His paintings construct spaces of suspension where landscape, memory and the human figure coexist in a permanent state of transition. Marked by solitude, ambiguity and estrangement, these territories become metaphors for the search for belonging and the instability of contemporary identities. In his work, the non-place appears as a space of possibility, where distance and indeterminacy become conditions for reinvention.

In António Faria’s artistic practice, memory and melancholy reveal the fragility of identity constructions. Through figurative and realistic representations of exuberant nature, the artist revisits the traditional genres of landscape and still life in order to construct intimate territories inhabited by traces, silences and incomplete narratives. His works evoke states of emotional distance that reflect broader experiences of fragmentation and disconnection, where nature emerges as a space of contemplation, permanence and the inscription of time.

Cesáh extends these questions into the digital realm. Through technologically mediated imagery, collage processes and virtual environments, the artist explores how contemporary subjectivities are constructed through immaterial networks of information and representation. His compositions are organised as visual ecosystems in which objects, signs and narrative fragments coexist within open systems of relation, suggesting an archipelagic condition marked by dispersion, connectivity and the continuous negotiation of identity.

Between landscapes, memories and digital ecologies, Archipelago proposes a reflection on the multiple ways of inhabiting the contemporary world. The archipelago emerges not as a collection of isolated entities, but as a relational structure in which singularity and connection coexist, revealing distance itself as a space of encounter, transformation and possibility.