Galeria Pedro Oliveira presents, starting September 19th, Προτεανιάδα / Proteaníada: Changing Figures, Some Portraits Without Legs, an exhibition by José Miguel Gervásio that brings together painting and drawing around Landscapes, Talking Portraits, a series that the painter has been developing for several years. The works, which come from different periods, are now placed in front of each other, in a kind of tangle of figures, objects, landscapes and images, in which the arrangement does not simply order what exists, but makes things change place and, by changing location, also change meaning. Perhaps it is here that the painter asks himself: what happens to the things of life that you can see when they pass through my studio? In Landscapes, Talking Portraits, human figures, objects, landscapes, and indeterminate forms move continuously between different states. A figure can become an object, a landscape can behave as a character, and a fragment can generate an entire painting. The narrative implied in the process is always a multi-faceted path. The exhibition title establishes a relationship with Proteus, the "old man of the sea" from the Odyssey, a figure capable of continuously changing form. In José Miguel Gervásio's painting, metamorphosis does not conceal an original identity that must be found: change is the very condition of form. The word πολύτροπον, which opens the Odyssey, adds to this idea the notion of many turns, many paths, and transformations. In this sense, Προτεανιάδα does not seek to represent change, but to make the painting itself the place where the event manifests itself. The painting is fixed, but the montage makes it parade. Paintings made at different times become, in a Warburgian way, contemporary through proximity; each remains what it is, but its presence changes when placed before another.