Albano Afonso presents a series of mobiles suspended in the air and composed of objects such as bronze vases, crystals and a mirrored skull. These elements rotate on themselves, merging with light beams projected on the walls. The title of the exhibition – In a State of Suspension – refers to the placement of these objects but also to the way our gaze is exposed to a horizontal abyss, a problem of balance like that found in his mobile sculptures. These sculptural sets hanging from Appleton’s ceiling are still lifes, an essential genre in the history of figurative painting which, paradoxically, takes us back to a very mental abstraction, insofar as an inexhaustible kaleidoscope of reflections and shadows emerges from a mysterious atmosphere, leading us into an abyss.

We find fragments of the artist’s body such as his hands creating plays of shadow evoking birds or dogs that recall the games of our childhood. We also find series of mineral crystals that are in themselves another nature built with crystals and with which the artist emphasises his interest in reflection and light. Elsewhere, we find this balance ironised with a series of weights. The image blurs and disappears.

All this is emphasised by the projection of coloured lights which, in turn, generate other framings, as happens in many of the artist’s photographic series – when he fragments his own studio to hide hidden self-portraits, suggested behind the light of the photographic flashes and insinuated through fragments of his body. This approach also dominates these mobile sculptures, which trace a kinetic and sound performativity to provoke suspense and contemplation while instigating a reflection on the substantial world and the universe existing beyond matter.

In In a State of Suspension, our gaze assumes a vertigo that takes hold of the experience at all times. A strange situation of waiting is then generated, transforming the landscape into a kind of mysterious paradise, so typical of Albano Afonso’s work, who is always seduced by the stories that come to us in a blur, portraying the unspeakable and using colour as a modulated event in instability, apprehending the world in its fluctuating dimension. For Albano, the world is not some kind of realistic drawing but a revelation of its pictorial power, allowing for the possibilities of the gaze as history to emerge as experience, and generating fissures in perception from an obsessive game with light and with the forms that overflow from his condition.