Reality emerges through the works on display; they are the visible corpus where the work of the two artists briefly meets.  This renders even more powerful the presence of Gorky’s final painting, based on the reading of Chekhov’s story of the same name.  Published in 1893, The Black Monk tells of the final years in the life of a young and erudite scholar who suffers a nervous breakdown and delusions of grandeur, in which he is visited by the apparition of a black monk who convinces him that he has been chosen by God for a higher purpose. Although he fleetingly experiences the happiness of marriage, the young man finds himself increasingly plunged into mediocrity without the monk’s company, and ends up dying of tuberculosis, with a final hallucination in which he is guided to glory. Gorky is thought to have found analogies between his own life and the tragic fate of Andrey Kovrin, the protagonist of Chekhov’s tale.

Opposite this painting, on the other side of the room, Queiroz displays five canvases made for the exhibition, in which he painted over screen-printed lines, as though on writing paper, evoking his reading of Gorky’s extensive and recently published correspondence.^[1] Queiroz’s paintings comment on and heighten the mystery that surrounds this encounter, which he agreed to organise, despite having to feel his way as though in a dream, or even a nightmare. Queiroz has been familiar since an early age with Gorky’s work, which was exhibited in the Gulbenkian in 1984, the year when the Mooradian Collection mentioned above arrived in Lisbon. The exhibition also includes another three paintings and a video by Queiroz, made specifically for this project, as well as several of his earlier works, on canvas and on paper.

The title of the exhibition, ‘to go to,’ was thought up by Queiroz, who wrote: ‘I think it’s a graphic image that goes in two directions: whether backwards or forwards the result is the same. For me, graphically, it’s a face. Also two men with hats, crossing a bridge.’ Suggesting a biunivocal correspondence, this palindrome (capicua in Portuguese) of words summarises the relative position between the works on display, the two artists and the observer.  It is necessary ‘to go to,’ we have to move ourselves to see, to compare or, simply, to leave the place we are in. Observers are asked to move about, treading on a soft yellow carpet on which their footsteps leave a mark.

^[1] Arshile Gorky. The Plow and the Song. A Life in Letters and Documents, Matthew Spender (ed.), Zurich: Hauser & Wirth Publishers, 2018