Poems of Tomorrow: João Motta Guedes

An arrow cuts across the space–time continuum and lands on a clock where many have landed before. A cluster of arrows punctuates time like a dartboard.

Poems of Tomorrow is João Motta Guedes’ first solo exhibition with Francisco Fino Gallery. In his iron clock, Taking a break from all your worries (2026), time is struck, held, suspended. Each black arrow becomes a poem of tomorrow – a promise, like knowing the sun always rises. Tomorrow is always arriving, full of propositions and possibilities. What the poems of tomorrow bring into the present remains open.

For Motta Guedes, poetry is not a reference but a method – a way of seeing, thinking, and making. His post-conceptual sculptures and installations are fabricated from metal, bronze, stone, and shattered glass: hard, sharp, sometimes luminous materials reduced to clean, minimal forms through which intimacy nonetheless insists on surfacing.

That intimacy is charged, not merely sentimental. Love, vulnerability, freedom, and violence move through the works as entangled forces. On the floor, a heavy bronze backpack bears the weight of movement and burden, while a sunflower emerges from it, upright and flourishing – Bringing the flowers to you (sunflower) (2025). Elsewhere, an enormous paper plane lands on a rock. Somewhere we may meet again (2026) brings more secret messages – poems that keep flying in. Too important to stay small, they grow enlarged with emotion. Poems act as containers of intensity, holding what might otherwise be too light to stay in place or too heavy to carry.

Nearby, the outline of a T-shirt is held in transparent broken glass, mounted flush against the white walls as part of a group encircling the gallery – Promise you’ll protect me (2026) forms an almost invisible and delicate collectivity. Translucency and opacity, light and shadow, stone and metal recur as both material and conceptual elements throughout Motta Guedes’ works, dangling a narrative of double-sided meanings. Likewise in, A measure of salvation (2026), a barbed-wire ladder leads nowhere, suggesting both infinite possibility and the false promise of choice. Portals, stairs, doors, and labyrinths are thresholds that position the exhibition as a terrain to be crossed, as forewarned by the wall-labyrinth at the entrance, The only way out is through, 2026. 

Right next to it, an oversized LED-lit portal, Edge of infinity (2026), beckons us to trespass into the other side. These works function as points of transition – passages between states – reproducing Motta Guedes’ long interest in travel as an indeterminate and open-ended process of transformation. Not as progress or arrival but as a state of becoming.

In this way, forms remain mutable, reshaped through encounter, emotion, and attention, like Catherine Malabou’s notion of plasticity, in which form is continually remade by what it receives (Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 2005, p. 42). The sculptures do not resolve; they remain open and provisional to what we attach to them.

Motta Guedes is interested in altered states of consciousness – moments in which the self loosens its grip, perception shifts, and the body becomes a site of knowledge, shaped by emotion and sensation. Meaning also emerges in the interval between inner and outer worlds. The exhibition’s emphasis on thresholds and in-between states recalls Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s articulation of liminality as a site where sense is produced through translation between interior and exterior (Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Elsewhere, Within Here, 2011, p. 55). Personal states do not remain enclosed but open onto shared conditions, not through identification but through proximity.

Poems of Tomorrow traces an inner journey that opens toward collective experience, articulating a kind of hopeless romanticism about the human condition – an attachment to intensity and transformation, and the belief that feeling is relational, and therefore political. Tomorrow is a nonlinear time, cumulative, looping and returning, marked by repetition, suspension, and delay. In this space, we find conditions for attention, movement, and affective alignment. Moving through fragments, pauses, and thresholds, tomorrow is carried forward by desire and imagination.