Chronotopy of Presence: SOLO SHOW BY Paulo Albuquerque

23 May - 11 September 2026

Overview

In “Chronotopy of Presence”, Paulo Albuquerque presents a body of entirely new works through which he deepens the relationship between time, space, and perception, proposing a reflection on the experience of the present within a context marked by acceleration, visual saturation, and the progressive erosion of attention.

The concept of the “chronotope” — from the Greek “chrónos” (time) and “tópos” (place) — developed by Mikhail Bakhtin, defines the inseparable relationship between time and space in the construction of experience and narrative. It corresponds to the point at which temporality and spatiality become mutually constitutive, shaping the way bodies, events, and perception inhabit the world. In Paulo Albuquerque’s practice, this notion manifests itself through suspended landscapes, fragmentary figures, and surfaces in constant transformation, where space ceases to operate as mere setting and instead becomes a temporal condition of experience. Time, in turn, materialises through the accumulation of layers, the repetition of gesture, and the persistence of the gaze.

The artist’s practice privileges process as the central structure of a body of work which, through strategies of repetition, accumulation, and stratified construction, asserts time as a constitutive substance, refusing conformity with the chrónos of immediacy. Slowness therefore emerges not merely as a model of passive opposition, but rather as a critical methodology and a mode of producing image and thought detached from the voracious and continuous regimes of consumption that characterise contemporaneity.

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The material and gestural dimension of Paulo Albuquerque’s painting assumes a central role in the construction of this perceptual experience. The brushstroke remains visible, dense, and fragmented, asserting itself both as a compositional structure and as a temporal record of gesture. Chromatic layers accumulate through rapid overlays and subtle interruptions, creating vibrant surfaces in which figure and landscape seem to oscillate between appearance and dissolution. A plasticity close to the strategies developed by Claude Monet in the late “Water Lilies” series, particularly in the way painting abandons objective description in favour of the atmospheric and sensory experience of perception.

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Between reflection and flow, between image and thought, between acceleration and suspension, “Chronotopy of Presence” proposes a space of sensitive resistance where attention asserts itself as a fundamental practice, and where slowing down becomes a form of critical perception of the world and of ourselves.

Works