For at least 10 years, drawing has been an instrument of research and intervention in the world for Victor Gonçalves. With a degree in Geography from Universidade Estadual Paulista (São Paulo, 2012), he chose observation drawing over photography as part of the methodology for a research on the appropriation of public space in Presidente Prudente, a city in the countryside of São Paulo. His concern was to question the absorption of a certain observed reality and use it as an interpretive resource. The study won the Young Scientist Award (CNPQ/FAPESP) and pointed the way to art for the then geographer, who arrived in Lisbon to improve his artistic training at Ar.Co, in 2017.

What you, visitors to this first individual exhibition by Victor Gonçalves, will find here, at Espaço NowHere, is a mature body of works by a young artist who continues to challenge the relationship between drawing and space, but now no longer under the key of representing the space, but to revolve our perception of the environment, surroundings, architecture, and other topics. We are faced with a myriad of drawing possibilities in the expanded field, in which not only the traditional notions of this medium are challenged, but also gravity and balance.

Sometimes the drawing is the result of a line that jumps off the wall due to an almost imperceptible glass plunger or by the action of the sun’s trajectory, amplified by a magnifying glass positioned in the main window of the space, which traces a strong line in the wood. In others, drawing is an artifice that camouflages the paper as sheet metal by the vigorous application of graffiti or reveals new traces of the houses and streets that surround the gallery through a floating lens. In almost all these cases, things seem at first sight, but they are not, which forces us to give in to the experience of reconsidering reality.

​The devices created by Victor Gonçalves are on the edge, whether because of the precarious stability of materials and elements or even the bankruptcy of vocabulary that is no longer able to conceptualize what we see. Drawing for this artist is risk in the sense of scratched and risky. There is beauty, vulnerability, ingenuity, and cunning in these operations, such as the life that is also always hanging by a thread.