Mind Set Art Center is honored present The Binding Strand of…, the second solo exhibition at the gallery by Portuguese artist Rui Miguel Leitão Ferreira. Departing from the figurative paintings presented in his previous solo exhibition, this presentation focuses on Ferreira’s abstract works, in which layers of acrylic paint, canvas, and found objects are interwoven and assembled through sculptural processes. The exhibition brings together a series of new works developed over several years since 2020. It will be on view from August 29 to October 8, 2026. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, August 29, at 3:30 p.m., with the artist in attendance. We warmly invite you to join us.
Spanning different periods and scales, the fourteen works in the exhibition propose an expanded understanding of abstraction. In Ferreira’s practice, abstraction does not eliminate the world from the canvas; instead, it becomes a process through which memory, material, and perception merge into an inseparable whole. The title The Binding Strand of… deliberately remains unfinished. Rather than imposing a fixed and closed narrative, it suggests an invisible yet resilient connective tissue—a strand moving between intuition and reason, image and object, interior thought and physical matter. Each work becomes a site in which these opposing conditions coexist and act upon one another without being resolved into a single, definitive answer.
Many of Ferreira’s compositions begin with a geometric grid, a rational framework that introduces order, proportion, and intention. Yet this structure never fully governs the image; it is continually challenged by the behaviour of paint itself. As pigments bleed, accumulate, and stain, the underlying geometry gradually becomes obscured. Gravity, viscosity, and chance intervene, disrupting geometry’s promise of absolute control. The works therefore remain in constant negotiation between the artist’s rational conception and the autonomous life of materials. Ferreira further complicates this dialogue through the repeated reuse of earlier canvases and stretchers. Previous paintings persist beneath the visible surface as concealed histories. Layers of paint, scars in the canvas, repaired edges, exposed seams, and accumulated textures transform each work from a singular image into an archaeological object bearing multiple temporal traces. Every new act of making reactivates the memory of what came before; canvas and stretcher are no longer neutral supports, but active, organic agents in the production of meaning.
Through this insistence on material presence, Ferreira’s work also enters into a subtle dialogue with the legacy of modernist painting. While critic Clement Greenberg identified flatness as painting’s defining condition, Ferreira treats the canvas as a physical object that literally occupies space. Thick deposits of paint, irregular edges, and the material histories embedded in reused canvases push the works beyond purely optical experience, giving them a dual identity as both images and objects. The smaller paintings are not studies for the larger works, but independent and parallel investigations. Titles such as This Is Where the Bodily Sensations and Intuitions Collide and Circular Breathing evoke states in which perception, intuition, and the cycles of life converge. Across all fourteen works, The Binding Strand of… transforms painting into a living field of interwoven relations, where structure and chance, memory and immediacy, flatness and objecthood remain suspended in productive tension. Rather than resolving these contradictions, Ferreira invites viewers to enter the connective space between them, allowing meaning to emerge through sustained attention to paint, canvas, traces, and time.
