For the 2023 edition of Drawing Room Lisbon, we present the curatorial project “Labyrinth” featuring entirely new works by Rui Horta Pereira and Rui Soares Costa, centered on the idea of a labyrinth, a path traversed while leaving behind Ariadne’s thread. As in Borges’ poem “Labyrinth | Laberinto”: “There will never be a door. You are inside | And the fortress encompasses the universe | And it has neither obverse nor reverse | Nor external wall nor secret center.”

Rui Horta Pereira, with the series “Objects to Deceive the Void,” invites the viewer to a game of light, shapes, and perception. Strips of paper define line and contour, deceiving space with their light spectrum, which arises from chromatic vibration. Paper and light bring Theseus out of the labyrinth.

Rui Soares Costa presents the series “Japanese Gardens for Miyazaki,” inspired by Japanese culture and its intrinsic respect for the Other (both human and non-human), and by Miyazaki’s celebration of the sweetness of imagination, in a visceral dialogue with non-humans. An Ariadne’s thread that may allow us to find the way out of the dense and dark labyrinth we find ourselves in today, in this new Anthropocene.

“Labyrinth” was awarded with the Prize Gallery Curatorial Project by the Millennium bcp Foundation.