The Gallery is pleased to contribute to this exhibition by lending works by Rui Moreira.

Curator: João Pinharanda
Trilingual exhibition catalogue in Portuguese, English, and French featuring texts by:
João Pinharanda, Rui Moreira: Lhiêngua de Artiston (“Artist’s Language” in Mirandese)
Rui Chafes, Awakened Drawings, Sleepwalking Drawings
Filipa Correia de Sousa, A Brief Vibration of Life in the Infinity of Time

The drawing he develops, singular and inhabited, leads him to summon—and dilute—the rational boundaries of discourse, seeking to merge a vast array of disparate elements. To achieve this result, Moreira brings together—both within a single image and through the succession of images in a single series or in the meticulous arrangements of his exhibitions—elements that are considered by rational thought to be separate or even antithetical: pairs such as the real and the dreamlike, nature and humanity, the West and the East, the scholarly and the popular, the past and the future, myth and history, figuration and non-figuration, narration and description, reflection and illustration, artistic and musical language (landscape, portrait, still life… or rhythm, harmony, timbre,…) and literary and philosophical themes (genealogies, stories, poetic speech,… or ontological questions).
— João Pinharanda, excerpt from the text Rui Moreira: Lhiêngua de Artiston (“Artist’s Language” in Mirandese), from the exhibition catalogue, February 2025

Jeanne Bucher Jaeger Gallery is pleased to collaborate with MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in Lisbon as part of the retrospective dedicated to Rui Moreira, from February 26 to June 2, 2025. This is the largest museum exhibition dedicated to the artist, who is now considered one of the leading Portuguese artists of his generation. This retrospective presents around a hundred works, including drawings/paintings and early photographs as well as a monumental sculpture, specially created for the exhibition and installed outside, in front of the museum. A part of the Transe exhibition will be hosted at the Graça Morais Contemporary Art Centre in Bragança, from July 5 to December 14, 2025.

Rui Moreira’s work is often rooted in his travels and sensory explorations of the world, experiencing and conveying—through his creations—the physical and psychological perceptions inherent to places or atmospheres: the overwhelming heat of the Moroccan desert, the freezing temperatures of the mountains at the source of the Ganges, the dance of Kathakali, the humidity of the Amazon jungle, the rituals of the Caretos of Podence in northern Portugal… These sensations are at the heart of the very structure of his drawings, created with meticulousness and extreme patience, like a mnemonic exercise based on a ritual action of the line, repeated endlessly, without chronology or linear spatiality. The monumentality of the whole is built through its minute detail and delicacy. Rui Moreira’s works often take the form of geometric abstractions forming a cosmography, or organic landscapes evoking the structures of living beings, or even deities emerging from mythological landscapes. Like these benevolent deities, Rui Moreira’s drawings are inhabited by a new form of life and beauty, heralding a certain way of being with the Earth.
I was drawing for several hours when I realized I was standing in millions of years of erosion, of time.
It was not only the greatest landscape I had ever seen, but also the greatest temporal landscape.

Rui Moreira (Porto, 1971) studied at Ar.Co – Center for Art and Visual Communication in Lisbon and at the Art Institute of Chicago. Exhibited at the gallery since 2008, several solo exhibitions have been dedicated to him – Inner Monsoon in 2010, La Nuit in 2014, The Passengers in 2022. The Gallery has also supported many of his exhibitions in international institutions. In 2014, Mudam Luxembourg devoted a major exhibition to him; in 2015, Rui Moreira’s work entered Société Générale’s Contemporary Art Collection. In 2016, a set of ten works was presented at the Pavilhão Branco in Lisbon. Titled Os Pirómanos, this exhibition was then shown at the Centro Internacional das Artes José de Guimarães in 2017. In 2018, international Japanese curator Yuko Hasegawa, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, presented his works in the exhibition Saudade – Unmemorable Place in Time — China-Portugal at the Fosun Foundation in Shanghai and later at the Museu Coleção Berardo — Centro Cultural de Belém in Lisbon. The artist was exhibited at the Lisbon Museum of Contemporary Art as part of the exhibition I II III IV V – five decades of Ar.Co in 2023.