The Municipal Galleries and the Júlio Pomar Atelier-Museum invited the artist João Penalva to create a work for the entrances of several EGEAC Contemporary Art venues — Torreão Nascente at Cordoaria Nacional, Galeria da Boavista, Galeria Quadrum, Pavilhão Branco and the Júlio Pomar Atelier-Museum — as part of the annual project A Work in Six Parts, initiated in 2024 by curators Sara Antónia Matos and Pedro Faro.
In 2026, the project takes place within the framework of the exhibition programme organised by Culturgest, the Municipal Galleries and the Cinematheque around the artist’s work. For this reason, this year the usual list of venues has been expanded to include the lobby of Culturgest, where visitors can also see the exhibition Characters and Interpreters.
The work João Penalva has created for this project unfolds in six movements, requiring viewers to travel across the city of Lisbon in order to fully experience, reconstruct and comprehend it. The six parts correspond to tokens of different colours which, once collected and placed inside the envelope received with the first one, will grant access to the puzzle: by presenting the envelope containing the complete set, visitors will be entitled to receive a box containing the complete work at any one of the six participating venues.
Although democratic in its distribution, the possession of this work requires traversing several labyrinths: that of the instruction map — contained in this gallery guide —, the city itself and its more and less hidden, more and less private places; the narratives suggested by the collected tokens, boxes, envelopes, marks and initials engraved upon them; and finally, perhaps in the comfort of one’s home during an evening’s leisure, the process of assembling and fitting the pieces together, uncovering the image inscribed within them.
With A Familiar Puzzle, the title of the work, João Penalva invites us to reconsider the idea of the image through its small parts, fragments and narrative possibilities, in a game where looking, observing, assembling and resolving (or perhaps not resolving) become fundamental and valued aspects of the artistic experience. Recalling Hermann Broch in The Death of Virgil:
“It almost seemed impossible, indeed almost inadmissible, that our ultimate and most real reality should amount to nothing more than a remembered image! Yet blessed by the image and cursed by the image is human life; only through images can it grasp itself. Images cannot be banished; they have been within us since the earliest herds, preceding and surpassing our thought. They belong to timelessness, containing within themselves both past and present; they are a double remembrance of dreams and are more powerful than we are.”
A puzzle is a game of patience, a riddle or enigmatic situation, composed of cut fragments, sometimes of unequal shapes, which must be combined and fitted together in order to form an image. Beginning from deformation, fragmentation and the possibility of reformation, Penalva challenges us. As Roland Barthes notes in Mythologies, “any object in the world can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state, open to appropriation by society”; in other words, “certain objects momentarily become prey to mythical speech”.
What is this image that João Penalva asks us to reconstruct, reperform, regenerate, restore and restructure? What are these fragments? What mythical challenge does he propose? What can a fragment do? Perhaps it is worth recalling Godard’s well-known phrase: “Ce n’est pas une image juste, c’est juste une image” (“It is not a just image, it is just an image”).
Will it be up to the public — to all of us — to ideologise or to poetise?
– 28.06.2026