As I write this I’m laying down, supine on a fainting couch, in a decaying mansion located in the foothills of the Cantabrian Mountains. The owner, a friend and sometimes patron, offered it to me as I contemplate the next phase of exile. I’ve spent most of the last two weeks on this couch, watching the light change. Flicking through the images of Gonçalo Preto’s new paintings on my phone, I’m surprised by a strange coincidence. An Abundance of Caution (2024) portrays a reclining figure with everything stripped away save for the nervous system: eyeballs, brain, spine, and branching nerves. I put my phone down and stare at the dust sparkling in the sunset, like I’m trying to glance some unyielding mystery. 

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The mansion is barely furnished. Just the way I like it. The fewer things there are, the more salient each item becomes. At night I light some candles and wander through the structure, the darkness echoing, quite like the kind in Preto’s older paintings, such as Misfits (2019). In the all-consuming black of night, a group of figures sit outside, under a ghostly, diplopic umbrella. Such are the small whiffs of tension in Preto’s work. The tension is subtle, sometimes barely noticeable, or it’s happening somewhere beyond the bounds of the painting. Visuality itself is Preto’s primary concern. His is a Hitchcockian eye: In Twinkle Twinkle (2022), Venetian blinds are permanently cracked for paranoid peepers.    

   

Entering Phantom Limb, audiences are met with what appears to be a blank wall. Depending on their position in the room and the time of day, an image flickers and changes. Lusco-Fusco (2024), they eventually understand, is an x-ray image of a man stabbed in the head, the blade deep in the cranium. The image is applied monumentally with glass powder; a shadow made of light rather than its absence, it functions as a segue to the rest of the exhibition. All the other works are like voices whispering to the head: Miyoko’s Lantern (2024) is like the burn of an afterimage, the firing of a synapse. The bottom half of the painting is yellow and the upper half is black, like a field and dark sky or corrupted film. A moon or flashbulb glows sickly. In the painting Touché (2024), shadowy hands hold some eyeglasses. It seems there are some bright royal blue curtains in the room, creating a sense of being underwater, a shimmering cinematic border between reality and fiction. Yes, phantom limbs, but also phantom pains, phantom pleasures! 

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I put the phone down. Outside my window a murder of crows twirl in the pitch black night. I curate my days like any critic or criminal. 

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A sequence of paintings titled Head of Steam (2024) depict a repeating point of view from a pair of binoculars. Two round lenses look out onto bodies of water, some sparkling, others dull. There is nothing to see; looking itself carries a sensuous charge. I have searched through every room and cabinet in this sooty rotting mansion and there are no devices for enhancing perception. But just yesterday I ventured into the nearest town, where I saw a woman laughing on the corner of the road and wearing a muddy shawl. We struck up a conversation, naturally. “There is a scientist who lives in another mansion not far from yours,” she said. “She has a telescope. Or is it a microscope?”

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-Text written by Rob Goyanes