Decrease the brightness until you see little (everything that is unruly and sensual belongs to the night). In the night’s fabric, things multiply from within - It has darkened and the tree is no longer, as it were, "a tree". It is now a whistling, dancing tree, with its own rituals, hiding and revealing. This fabric, dark, dark, sometimes pitch dark, is; and it is, because it uneases the body; It is, because just as it retracts, it stimulates and forces it to move, to see better, to hear better, and what was once turbid and slippery is now tangible. I say now, so that in the future we will not forget: at night all beings are elusive.

In Middle Finger Pedestrians, we are not facing a traditionally told story. Now, we could choose to wait for “once upon a time…”, but I am sure it won’t be announced until later; “Pedestrians of the middle finger” (let's be literal) is the result of a set of paintings that show us the intertwining of a narrative that, without statement or glossary, manifests itself as visions that are given in the blink of an eye. That leave us to work with the “ifs” in this story of misaligned and permanently undeveloped temporal and spatial resourcefulness.

A van parked in the dark, foliage and insignificant remnants of light - the dogs of the night have no owner and are the dogs (silently) doing the surveys; little in the distance, confined to pitch darkness but entertained, farther and farther and darker, it is for them to wait; the bird looks dead and the beast threatens the hand, another (who knows if the same) is about to roll a joint and in the midst of all this, the tree that received us goes on and on: enlarged planes, closed planes, life-size figures and partially cut ones, close to us or far away - Each painting, although originating from different challenges and ambitions regarding practice, inevitably ends up converging in the following, and thus successively highlighting a network of formal and informal correlations that eventually result in a contagious and engaging environment.

At night all beings are elusive, and all that remains are sudden glimpses and flashes — a still, blurred image of a distant interrupted wave.

Gonçalo Preto (Lisbon, Portugal, 1991) lives and works in Lisbon. He first studied Product Design at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Lisbon, then in 2012 he studied at the Kassel Kunsthochschule, Kassel, Germany and completed his education studying Drawing and Painting at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, USA. His solo exhibitions include: Limbo, Museu Carlos Machado, Walk & Talk, São Miguel, Azores (2019); Frag.men.to, Madragoa Encima, Lisbon (2017). His group exhibitions include: Cabinet, Museu Nacional de História Natural e Ciência, Lisbon (2019); Síntese Ativa, Galeria Fórum Arte Braga, Braga (2019); There’ll Never Be a Door. You’re Inside. Works from the Coleção Teixeira de Freitas, Sala de Arte, Fundación Santander, Madrid (2019); Approx., CONDO London, Madragoa at The Shop, Sadie Coles HQ (2018); Sever, Galeria Boavista, Lisbon (2017); Blue, The Switch Gallery, Lisbon (2016); Babel, Miguel Justino Contemporary Art, Lisbon (2016); 4, Cidadela Art District, Cascais (2015); Spring Show, Academy of Art University, San Francisco (2015); Spring Show, Academy of Art University, San Francisco (2014); Means to an End, Neurotitan Gallery, Berlin (2013); Not Exklusiv, Rundgang, Kassel Kunsthochschule, Kassel (2012).