It is with great pleasure that we announce Flaming Bodies, the second solo show by Pedro Valdez Cardoso at the gallery.
OPENING
Thursday, April 16 | 9 – 9.30 PM
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DURATION
16.04 – 30.05.2026
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Pedro Valdez Cardoso has been carving out a unique and notable path within Portuguese contemporary art, characterized by his exploration into a persistent set of questions that, to varying degrees, consistently address phenomena linked to bodily experience and the construction of identity, as well as a critical assessment to contexts and mechanisms that shape, regulate, and condition them. By working across sculpture, installation, and image-making, the artist has thus established a practice strongly articulated between individual and collective, private and public, which has allowed him to create an idiosyncratic universe and vocabulary, where archetypal figures (masks, ghosts, skeletons…), vernacular materials (threads, strings, textiles, papers...) and techniques from handicrafts (sewing, embroidery, tufting, collage...), which not only lend a certain scenographic and theatrical dimension to the artist’s works (also indicating his basic training) but, more significantly, allow an immediate recognition and reflective familiarity. In this territory, situated between the space of representation and that of intimacy - where intersecting seams can either suture or expose wounds that are difficult to heal - Pedro Valdez Cardoso strives to reveal human and societal forms (and, the artist’s case, Western societies are the starting point) as precarious and unstable constructs, continuously traversed by contradictory forces, where bodies emerge as inscribed surfaces and remnants of perhaps unfathomable events, in constant conflict between normative rationalism historical forms and the untimely, unthought-of depths that underlie them.
“Flaming Bodies”, the second solo exhibition featuring Pedro Valdez Cardoso at Galeria NO·NO, extends all of these concerns and aesthetic horizons by reflecting the mechanisms of desire’s formation and conflagration. Human spontaneous combustion - a hypothesis alluded to in the project’s title, referencing the belief that human body is capable of self-immolation without any external source of ignition, is, in this sense, displaced from a pseudoscientific conviction due to the metaphorical power of an extreme image and a Lacanian reading of desire as a constitutive and originary lack. From this arises a conception of human beings as structurally incomplete and unfinished entities, traversed by a volitional energy that constantly consumes them without ever being fully satisfied. Desire manifests itself as an irrepressible burning, or an ever-present potentiality for igniting, and burning reveals itself as a way of revealing all that, within the body, constantly presses upon it and compels it.
This is further reinforced by another, although less obvious, suggested by the title of this exhibition (and which we will later find in the works displayed), and which alludes to Jack Smith’s cult film “Flaming Creatures” (1963), famous for his fragmented, dreamlike, and orgiastic approach exploring sexuality, disrupting established expectations and exploding distinctions and gender positions. “Flaming Bodies”, though, does not focus solely on erotic desire - bodies whose flesh “burns” with passion - but rather on how this burning is itself a symptom of a body that continually “burns” and reconfigures itself linguistically, socially, culturally, or politically. And it is precisely on this crossroads, as sensitive as it is symbolic, where works presented in this exhibition hope to make it known. From the top floor, with “A History of Violence” (2026) - a structure in pink silicone, simulating a window grate, padlocked, and oscillating between tactile seduction or a call to open up and the imposition of a limiting barrier that proves insurmountable - and the set of photoengravings “Flaming Creatures” #1 and #2 (2020) - where we see two classic statues’ faces covered by some sort of mask of seashells, hiding their standard features and replacing them with a certain metamorphic, shapeless, and elusive languor. Moving on to the gallery's lower level, a set of eleven photographs covered in red acrylic glass presents us ambiguous figures - somewhere between a ghost and a scarecrow - creating a kind of unsettling and incandescent atmosphere - “Skin” (2026) - accentuated by the strange set of black rubber gloves sewn together, somewhere between human and animal, the domestic space and the reminiscence of practices considered taboo - “A strange kind of love” (2026) - both works in sharp contrast with the almost melancholy fragility of the installation composed of a body shield covered in kraft paper, fixed to one of the space’s pillars, and the nine branches and leaves sewn from the same material, arranged there on the floor - “Aftersun” (2026).
“Flaming Bodies” thus finds its niche in an uninterrupted oscillation between norm and deviation, freedom and prohibition, safety and danger, impulse and despondency, visibility and concealment between a provisional “I” and a certain otherness that always emerges and alters the whole. This is where Pedro Valdez Cardoso operates within an intermediate realm, where objects remain in liminal zones, in undecided states, and what we see are not stabilized forms or gestures, but condensations of something that, paradoxically, both persists and haunts us, while existing under the threat of disappearance. And it's at this point of intermittent instability where the bodies proposed by the artist burn.
DAVID SILVA REVÉS
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PEDRO VALDEZ CARDOSO
Flaming Bodies
16.04 – 30.05.2026
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Exhibition text : David Silva Revés
Photography : Bruno Lopes
Video : João Silva