Opening: March 14 at 6 p.m.
On display until: April 30, 2026
Location: LAC – Creative Activities Laboratory
Price: Free admission
Synopsis
The exhibition “Território de Contacto” brings together works by Cruzes + Vargas that develop through objects and constructions that evoke furniture, shelter, or life-size models. They are precarious and almost functional forms that suggest use without fully fulfilling it. In them, the body is absent but permanently implied, summoned by scale, weight, and instability.
Taken together, these works do not seek a synthesis or a common narrative. Dialogue is established through proximity and contrast: the figure encounters the structure, the represented body confronts the constructed object. Between painting and installation, an intermediate space opens up where each work alters the reading of the other.
The exhibition thus proposes a territory of contact, where different practices touch without merging, inviting visitors to understand how space, matter, and presence are constructed between image, object, and body.
Biography
Ricardo Cruzes (1974, Portugal)
Born in Lagos, Ricardo Cruzes is a visual artist whose career reflects an unusual intersection between painting, technological design, and entrepreneurship. He has a degree in Painting from ARCA (Coimbra) and graduated in Web Design from ETIC (Lisbon), initially developing his career in the digital world, creating two design and software companies. As a design director, he developed projects for brands such as BP and Banco Santander, and the website he created for the National Museum of Archaeology was awarded 1st place worldwide by UNESCO in the Museums and Heritage category.
After the acquisition of his startup, Proppy CRM, by the multinational Casafari, Cruzes decided in 2022 to devote himself exclusively to his artistic practice.
His recent work inhabits the friction between the sublime and the grotesque, where hope and fear intertwine in an ambiguous field of contamination and displacement. Through color, drawing, and scale, Cruzes addresses complex themes such as mental health, social masks, and literal, symbolic, structural, intimate, and historical violence.
In his methodology, he often draws on family and public photographic archives: images of strangers or distant memories serve as triggers for the creation of scenes in which morality proves flexible and human relationships are dissected in their transversality.
Resident artist and co-curator at LAC (Laboratory of Creative Activities, Lagos), Cruzes stands out for his strong collaborative and transdisciplinary approach. Among his most relevant projects are the collaboration Cruzes + Vargas (with architect Rui Vargas – Kuwait), Hyperactive Memory Ruins (with sculptor Joel Arantes – Norway) and High Tide, Low Tide (with photographer Jason McGlade – Berlin). His recent resume includes exhibitions at institutions such as the Lagos Cultural Center (Lagos), Casa da Arquitectura (Porto), and Skiens Kunstforening (Norway).
Rui Vargas
Rui Vargas has a degree in Architecture. He is a resident artist at LAC in Lagos and Gamarama in Faro. His company operates mainly in Kuwait and Portugal, with branches also in the Algarve and Lisbon.
Is Rui Vargas an architect artist, or an artist architect? The question arises because it is complex—if not impossible—to identify a dividing line between the two activities in his artistic and architectural work.
It is precisely in this indistinct territory that the creative mechanism that leads him to produce art and architecture in a detached manner resides. He seeks disparate inspirations: from architectural memories of his childhood, through the rational and interpreted appropriation of the masters he admires, to the expressive, quick, and direct simplicity he recognizes in children—and in adults like Rui himself.
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