‘Brincar com canoas e afogar cães’ [Play with canoes and drown dogs] (2023), by Diogo Nogueira, is a huge painting (using an advertising screen as its support), in which eleven male figures are divided between two canoes, while a third, apparently empty vessel, drifts out of the scene.

None of these eleven figures has a defined face, making it impossible to identify or look at them subjectively – the central theme here is not the body or the isolated figure, but the relationships between bodies and how their encounters build community.

The unfinished shapes of the figures in the undefined landscape bring to the foreground, in our reading of the painting, not the characters or the setting they inhabit, but the relationships between the bodies, and the tensions kindled as they meet others.

In this dream-like place, the fantasy of touch wavers between the poles of violence and affection: the dog biting a hand, the hand touching a face, the brushing of the naked skin of the boat mates, various gestures with multiple and very different readings, depending on the story we want to tell.

Their comfortable nudity seems amplified by the presence of a single clothed figure, who reinforces the interplay of opposing readings, as well as a certain strangeness inherent to fiction (born of the tension between that which resembles or differs from reality); the same is achieved by the laughter shared by most of the figures, which seems not to fit with the threat of death announced in the title. That laughter could, without knowledge of the omen, be the celebration of a queer joy of communion between bodies, which, in its different ritualistic community constructions, is so distint from sexual and gender normativity.

Tinting the fiction with an almost imperceptible autobiographical aspect, Diogo Nogueira is a painter but also a theme, translating into images the idea of an identity, the layers that construct it, the references that influence it and the desires that shape it.

His work is permeated by a keen awareness of the potential of myth and fiction in creating individual and, particularly, collective identities – inseparable from something that for many years has been claimed by queer theory as its most disruptive use, that ability to allow ourselves to imagine worlds and forms of relationship that are different from those established by the prevailing social order.

His pictorial fictions invite us to imagine endless human narratives, that can spill over into the reality of the world and expand the possible horizons of common life beyond the rules and norms, in a place where body and desire are one and the same.