Unlike many works by Fernando Lemos – which appear not to suit the title given by the artist, or whose complexity of superimposed planes in multiple exposures makes them difficult to understand – this has a direct correspondence between the title and what we see in the image.

We might even say that this is a ground zero in Lemos’s work: an image of the real world and its permanence; the materiality of the stone reinforced by the title of the photograph, with no margin for doubt.

However, this correspondence between title and image is not pacifying, but rather a statement of suspicion in a work process that, as we already know, frequently takes a path of ambiguity, surrealism and mystery.

It is an image that, by focusing on evidence and permanence, calls attention to precisely the opposite, to the future, to change, to a potential metamorphosis, possibly in the suggestion and invitation to an exercise of ‘sabotage’ of the true real.

José Oliveira
2022