Luso-Portugueses: Solo show by René Tavares

Luso-Angolan, Luso-Santomean, Luso-Brazilian, Luso-Cape Verdean, Luso-Mozambican, Luso-Guinean, Luso-Timorese… why not simply Portuguese? Luso-Portuguese starts from this linguistic irony to challenge the historical, colonial and identitarian boundaries inscribed in the very act of naming, in the very idea of “luso”, and to question who is authorised to inhabit it. Connected through historical processes of domination and circulation, territories in other latitudes were marked by a prefix that defines the “other”: the “almost”, the “not quite”, the “hybrid”, the “outside the norm”. An accent shifts from a distinctive trait to a mark of exclusion. Thus, the term “luso-” becomes here an object of critical reflection: who can be called luso? Who is allowed to carry this prefix? And what does this unequal distribution of names, categories and accents reveal?

René Tavares’s work intersects memory, identity and diaspora in a practice that combines painting, drawing, photography and textile elements. His work reflects on processes of cultural mixing, colonial legacies and forms of resistance embedded in contemporary Afro-diasporic narratives. Through layers of colour and gesture, the artist creates compositions in which figuration and abstraction intertwine, evoking both the cultural heritage of São Tomé and Príncipe and the hybrid, transitory realities of a post-colonial world.

At Kunsthalle Lissabon, Tavares presents a new body of work that expands his investigation into historical memory and belonging. Figures appear overlaid with the Coat of Arms of Portugal, a gesture that raises fundamental questions: what does it mean to carry a coat of arms? Who owns it, and who is excluded from it? What traces of heritage, power or lack of recognition are inscribed in this symbol?

Among the new paintings shown is also a series of figures in domestic interiors, something relatively rare in the artist’s practice. In one of them, a family poses in what could be their living room, where a collection of Vista Alegre porcelain pieces stands out, objects found in many Portuguese homes. The presence of these items evokes a historical desire for integration into a certain imaginary of Portugueseness, reflecting how signs of prestige and belonging circulate, are appropriated and reconfigured. In another portrait, a woman seated on a green chair confronts the viewer with a firm and defiant, perhaps proud, posture, asserting her presence and agency.

Beyond the portraits, there is also a triptych of still lifes in which cotton branches—materials deeply tied to colonial economies and their violences—become elements of domestic decoration, placed in the same blue-and-white porcelain vases atop traditional furniture covered with white lace, establishing a tension between decorative beauty and a history of extractivism of bodies, land and forced labour.

Text by Kunsthalle Lissabon

Finally, this group of paintings is joined by a chair that simultaneously evokes the monarchical throne and Portugal’s presidential “Chair of the Lions”, now part of the décor of the Official Office of the Republic. It is an object that raises questions of authority, representation and legitimacy: who may occupy this place? How is the right to sit in a position of power constructed or denied? Within this dialogue, the seated woman becomes even more incisive: which body can claim this seat, and which history enables or prevents that claim?

Taken together, these works articulate different ways of staging presence, hierarchy and memory, inviting reflection on how history is transmitted and transformed through images, bodies and spaces. The work not only questions how we see ourselves and how we are seen, but also how we are named, who holds the power to name, and what such naming produces symbolically, politically and socially.