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We present the exhibition Colours, Words and Enigmas by artist Catarina Real (Barcelos, Portugal, 1992), bringing together a body of works produced between 2016 and 2026. Her artistic practice occupies a territory where language and image mutually influence one another, articulating drawing, writing and colour as systems of relation. Catarina pays particular attention to the structures of language as a way of shaping the world, simultaneously drawing on sensory experience, memory and gesture.

“Colours, Words and Enigmas” unfolds as a chromatic investigation, composed of different bodies of work that, while autonomous, share connections around the way colour and word construct meaning and possibilities of relation. In this sense, these are works that do not seek to fix meanings, but rather to open links between the visible and the readable, generating shifts between perception, sensation and interpretation.

The series “Choreography” explores writing as gesture, where the mark approaches a choreography without a fixed referent, testing the boundaries between sign and image. In “Modes of Attention”, drawing emerges as a temporal practice, traversed by different states of concentration and listening, incorporating external interferences that destabilise the linearity of the gesture. In the series “Fall”, the experience of falling serves as a starting point for constructing a visual grammar based on onomatopoeia and variations of intensity, bringing language and sensation closer together, while in “Cycle Landscapes”, the artist proposes images open to the participation of others, where word and drawing collaborate in the projection of possible futures.

In the series “I Don’t Know How to Tell Stories”, she investigates relationships between form and colour that dispense with narrative mediation, and in “Enigma Colours” she deepens her reflection on colour as a phenomenon that is simultaneously material, perceptual and linguistic, in dialogue with the possibility of imagining other ways of naming and understanding it. Finally, in “I Remember All the Colours”, she articulates text and painting from fragments of memory, where evocation is constructed through association and repetition, closer to an exercise in recollection than to a narrative.

It is worth noting that Catarina Real’s working process oscillates between construction and drift. We discover an attention to structures, to the organisation of space, sign and colour, alongside an openness to deviation, interference and chance. In this way, the works are the result of a continuous negotiation between intention and listening, between what is projected and what emerges in the very act of making.

Colours, Words and Enigmas is not presented as a closed work, but as an expanding field. Its unity resides less in a theme than in an attitude: thinking of language and colour as living materials, capable of reconfiguring relationships and producing other ways of being together.

With the support of