SALTO GALLERY
Curator
KNOW WHO YOU ARE AT EVERY AGE
Catarina Real, Lucrezia Bracci, Maria Marques Moderno,
Maria Miguel Café, Mariana Malheiro
Know Who You Are at Every AgeIn Know Who You Are at Every Age, five artists weave together the threads of inner experience with the outer world. From diaries to dreams and rituals, both personal and collective, the diverse practices in the exhibition bring together intimate reflections. The title, borrowed from the Four-Calendar Café album by the Cocteau Twins, emerges not only as a discreet invitation to self-recognition and care, but also as a prompt to consider the estrangement and constant shifts in how we relate to one another. At the core of this show lies a growing tension, the paradox of contemporary hyper-connectedness. In an age when personal experiences are constantly broadcast, flattened into pixels, likes, and metrics, genuine intimacy and emotional availability seem more elusive than ever. The works presented do not attempt to resolve this contradiction. Rather, they inhabit it, exposing the blurred lines between the self and its surroundings, between solitude and sociality, exposure and invisibility. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus describes the moment when “the absurd” reveals itself, not in grand catastrophe, but in the quiet collapse of meaning, when the routines of everyday life lose their coherence and the world appears suddenly strange, ungraspable. These meditations on alienation resonate here, not as bleak conclusions but as reference points for an inquiry into meaning and identity.
The artists offer glimpses into emotional terrains shaped by longing, uncertainty, and personal resilience. These are not confessions, but fragments, observations that resist closure or easy catharsis. Yet, despite the melancholic undercurrent, there is levity in the exhibition, a softness in tone, a kind of wry humour or awkward charm that recalls a strange sincerity. These are works that acknowledge vulnerability as an aesthetic and political stance, not merely as subject matter. In a society that rewards intimacy only as performance, to care (for oneself, for others, for making) becomes a radical act. The artists in this exhibition practice care through their gestures, they share without overexposing, they build worlds without claiming universality. They invite us not only to look, but to dwell, to stay with the uncomfortable, the unfinished, the emotionally charged. In its layering of media and perspectives, Know Who You Are at Every Age becomes a small constellation of subjective truths. These are stories not told in grand gestures but in the margins, in scribbles, glances, images, documentation and imaginary worlds. And in doing so, the exhibition offers a counterpoint to the spectacle of identity, proposing instead an introspective cartography of feeling, a space where personal mythologies unfold and invite us to share.