From his artistic practice, from his artwork, we can say that he is an artist who explores different media, revealing a continuous restlessness where classic and contemporary issues related to the artist's workshop practice intersect, as well as an intense critical reflection on what he is presenting to us, assisted by a technical mastery that is uncommon nowadays.  

Isaque Pinheiro has shown his work in various art galleries, museums and biennials, including the Stenersen Museum (Oslo, Norway), the Galician Centre for Contemporary Art in Compostela (CGAC) (Spain), Caixa Cultural do Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), Paço Imperial (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), Museu Soares dos Reis (Porto, Portugal) and Museu Amadeu de Sousa Cardoso (Amarante, Portugal) and also at Galeria Presença (Porto), Caroline Pagès, Insofar e Zaratan Arte Contemporânea (Lisbon), Mário Sequeira (Braga), Laura Marsiaj (Rio de Janeiro) and Ybakatu (Curitiba), among others.

His work is represented in the collections of the PLMJ Foundation (Lisbon), EDP Foundation | MAAT (Lisbon), State Contemporary Art Collection (CACE), Amadeo de Sousa-Cardoso Museum (Amarante), MG Collection (Alvito), Municipal Art Collection (Porto), Museu da Bienal de Cerveira, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporânea (Santiago de Compostela, Spain), Fundação Caixanova (Spain), Fundação Edson Queiroz (Fortaleza, Brazil), Galila Barzilai Hollander (Brussels, Belgium) and other private collections in various countries.

He was awarded the 12th Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso Prize - Acquisition Prize by the Friends of the Library-Museum and has been honoured twice in different editions of the Cerveira International Art Biennial (BIAC). In 2023 he was honoured with the SPA - Sociedade Portuguesa de Autores award for Best Visual Arts Exhibition of 2022.

Monument to Error

"You've tried. You've failed. It doesn't matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." - declares Samuel Beckett in Worstward Ho. This statement points to something deeper than a simple call for resilience. It presents itself as part of an ethic of imperfection, an aesthetic of failure. It praises error as a fruitful element of the human condition, the engine of creation and a form of resistance to the ideal of perfection that so often paralyses.

So let's imagine a monument to error. Not a triumphant monument, but a suspended space, in process, under permanent construction, where failed attempts pile up like loose stones - a formal denial of the constitution of solid, finished foundations. Instead, they are the marks of an incomplete journey. This is where the image of river water gains strength: not as a continuous flow that overcomes hardness, but as a pause. A pause before the images of stones against dry land. An interval where error breathes, where failure ceases to be noise and becomes language.

It is therefore a question of inverting the expression ‘water soft on a hard stone, beaten until it breaks’. Instead of insistence as fury, we propose listening to fragility: the stone no longer resists, but it doesn't submit either. Water no longer hurts, but goes around. It's not about triumph, but about coexisting with what can't be resolved, with what remains open.

Error is not the absence of success, but the presence of other possibilities. It is a gesture that escapes utilitarian reason, a form that is deconstructed to make room for the unexpected. Error, understood in this way, is also a way of thinking - a necessary deviation from the rational dogma of exactitude. In error there is creation, there is movement, there is will that does not resign itself. Perhaps it is on this unstable ground that chance is built - not in a definitive and absolute way, but in a transitory one; not imposingly, but sensibly.

To erect a monument to error is thus to refuse the oppression of failure and recognise in it the material of reality. It means accepting that failing better is, in many cases, the only possible progress. It's not a question of romanticising failure, but of understanding that failure contains its own knowledge - a knowledge that is not learned from manuals or triumphs, but from the raw experience of trying without any guarantee.

And if art, life and thought are made up of successive attempts, perhaps we should learn to see error not as an obstacle, but as an opportunity to configure the unfinished - an unfinished that urges us to question, to redo, to continue.

João Baeta