Galeria de Santa Maria Maior

R. da Madalena 147, 1100-006 Lisboa

14 . 10 . 2026 → 07 . 11 . 2026

monday - saturday → 03:00 pm – 08:00 pm

Artist

Paulo Simão

Erased is not a gaze to the past but to the future! In Erased Paulo Simão evokes Erased de Kooning Drawing by Robert Rauschenberg and, by manipulating a set of images from the US Library of Congress, reframes the archive and develops a series that invites us to a myriad of questions and reflections.

Like Rauschenberg, when adding a subtitle to the photographic image, Paulo Simão assumes that he erased to reveal, he took out to add, and what has apparently been censored never ceased to be there. With his intervention, Simão creates a kind of anti-evocative monument and, by isolating the plinth, he opens a new perspective and approach to the artistic work. Moreover, he emphasizes the importance and role that the artist, the artistic work and, in this particular project, the evocative public art piece, assume by validating certain values, knowledge, historical events or collective memories.

This sort of catalogue, which takes us to the photographic universe of Bernd and Hilla Becher, begins to reveal the red lines, hidden by pixels that are no longer there or have been added as a result of today’s technological possibilities.

Four years after the invasion of the US Capitol we start seeing the questions Paulo Simão wants to address. Do we need new monuments and forms of celebration? What can we do with monuments that already exist in public space, which evoke and celebrate historical events that are anachronistic and collide with a contemporary and humanist vision of society? How do democracies deal with their colonial and imperial past and history? What is the role of schools, educators, cultural agents, and the media in today’s society? Finally, Simão invites us to reflect upon the difficulty that political actors face to connect to citizens, in a world with less and less mediation and how misinformation is the perfect environment for the growth of populism.