"Architectures of the Invisible": The solo exhibition by Azorean artist Gabriel Garcia at the Augusto Cabrita Auditorium in Barreiro

  • “Between the visible and the imagined, there are structures that sustain us.”
  • “Architectures of the Invisible presents the latest chapter in Gabriel Garcia’s pictorial research, an artist who constructs a language deeply...

    “Architectures of the Invisible presents the latest chapter in Gabriel Garcia’s pictorial research, an artist who constructs a language deeply rooted in insularity, suspension and the fragility of human presence. As he himself states, “the definition of a work of art is a process”, and it is precisely within this process — shaped by silence, composition, gesture and matter — that this exhibition takes shape, bringing 40 previously unseen works to the public.

     

    Drawing on the Atlantic landscape as an emotional and symbolic territory, Gabriel Garcia creates images in which anonymous figures inhabit margins, fragile platforms, water surfaces or stripped-back spaces. These are bodies that seem to exist in an in-between state, in a suspended time between the real and the symbolic. They are not portraits, but presences: silent archetypes of universal experiences of searching, introspection and survival.”

     

     - Claúdia Magalhães, Curator

  • “There is something theatrical and cinematic about Gabriel Garcia’s images. Each painting seems to capture a moment: a frame taken...

    “There is something theatrical and cinematic about Gabriel Garcia’s images. Each painting seems to capture a moment: a frame taken from a larger narrative, whose before and after remain off-screen.

     

    The figures seem to obey rules we do not know, engaged in actions whose logic remains deliberately open.

    The Ínsula Station — that poetic laboratory of isolation and resistance — silently permeates this universe. The island ceases to be merely a territory: it becomes a condition, a memory, a mirror and a site of transformation. It is not made of stone, but of relationships, memories, absences, desires and invisible bonds.

     

    The void, so present in the artist’s practice, is not an absence. It is a space of possibility: the place where light reveals states of consciousness and where the everyday is transformed into symbol.

     

    Gabriel Garcia paints the moment when a story is interrupted. And he passes the testimony on to the viewer. It is for us to imagine what happened before, what might happen afterwards, what connects or separates the figures, what lies hidden behind what we see. It is in this interval between presence and absence, reality and imagination, that the invisible begins to become perceptible.”

  • “The artist constructs countless narratives along this journey, which is his and, simultaneously, ours: a place for us to inhabit. And within this place, painting returns to us the task of continuing the process.

     

    Perhaps this is the silent force of insularity: transforming a territory into an existential condition. As Vitorino Nemésio (portuguese poet) wrote, ‘our bones sink into the sea.’”
  • The Artist

    The Artist

    Gabriel Garcia is a visual artist from the Azores who lives and works between the Azores and Lisbon. Painting and installation are at the core of his artistic practice, which is developed through an ongoing reflection on identity, belonging, and displacement. His work engages critically with the concept of the “non-place” as a physical, emotional, and symbolic space, focusing on transitional zones where the boundaries between the known and the unknown, the individual and the collective, become permeable.

     

    His research stems from the experience of moving between insular and urban territories, resulting in works that address contemporary conditions of mobility, uprootedness, and the search for place. Through atmospheres often marked by suspension, solitude, and ambiguity, his paintings evoke states of introspection and question the mechanisms that shape identity and the sense of belonging.

     

    Influenced by the psychological dimension of the painting of Edward Hopper and Edvard Munch, Gabriel Garcia employs the image as a field of existential inquiry, where melancholy and vulnerability become possibilities for discovery and reinvention.

     

    His practice unfolds as an open-ended process of questioning, proposing the non-place not as an absence, but as a fertile territory of transformation. Through his work, he explores the notions of visible and invisible boundaries that structure human experience.

  • Sobre a galeria

    THIS IS NOT A WHITE CUBE is an international contemporary art gallery, founded in Luanda in 2016 and based in Lisbon, Portugal. Through the representation and collaboration with both national and international artists, whether established or emerging, the gallery presents a program focused on relevant narratives and debates, associated with the European context and the Global South. With a pioneering spirit of decompartmentalization and inclusion, favoring intercultural dialogues, it is the first African gallery in Portugal to open its collaborative circle to both local artists and artistic productions from the Global South, including Brazil and non-Lusophone African countries. The gallery maintains a regular and significant presence at major international art fairs.