Some things die. Others we kill. Others still we thought were dead, only to realize they somehow continued to live with us and surface through us. "Morto, Matado, Morrido" begins with that strange abundance afforded by the Portuguese language: three ways of naming an ending that sit remarkably close to one another, yet describe different ways of arriving there, of dealing with what ends and with what remains afterwards.

In his second solo exhibition, Diogo Potes moves through precisely that untidy territory where life changes state. Ten paintings approach relationships, desire, anxiety, exhaustion, isolation and moments of almost invincible vitality through a logic we can never quite tell belongs to dream or memory. Or a lingering crippling fear. Perhaps it is a dream vivid enough to betray reality; perhaps it is reality which, once carried deep into the body, returns reimagined as a dream. Within that ambiguity, very simple moments vibrate, weigh or paralise, haunt or excite.

Vulnerable. Death enters. Or hovers. At times it takes on a body and becomes a character; elsewhere it is simply a presence outside the frame, playing and peeking. Not necessarily the death of the body, but that of a relationship, an expectation, a version of ourselves, something that had to end so that something else could continue. There is, throughout, that quiet gymnastics of adulthood between what we manage to carry forward and what, in order to keep moving, we inevitably leave suspended within ourselves.

Within Potes’s irresistibly unruly imagery, bodies, faces and objects, alongside an innocence cut through with acidity, coexist with color, humor and a distinctly punk darkness. Oil holds and heightens that second before a decision: overlaying, interrupting and distorting, as though painting had to break the mirror in order to look into it. Memory remains accessible, but no longer intact; emotion acquires enough substance to be observed from the outside.

"Morto, Matado, Morrido" lives precisely in that tension between life and death, between what is lost as we grow, what we deliberately leave behind and what returns when we thought it had been resolved. Some endings happen to us; others we choose. Some set us free. Others continue to haunt us. And there are things that, even when mortas, matadas e morridas, still have something left to tell us.