Joana da Conceição’s paintings share a condition of in-betweeness from which stems both their singularity and their driving force. For instance, her paintings occupy a place between figuration and abstraction and exploit this dubious space made up of things that seem familiar but which we can’t really name. Perhaps that’s due to their presenting a set of archetypal motifs that we assimilate intuitively, but whose interactions deliver subtle enigmas; Or because of the successively overlapping layers that cancel, once and again, every hint of representation that there might exist … On the other hand, these paintings lay somewhere between the static quality of the image they inevitably are and the will to uphold painting as a performative act, as something that registers the movement of a body that thinks of and with painting and that makes decisions like one who plays a game in which all action is simultaneously cause and consequence. But perhaps more importantly, Joana da Conceição’s works roam between the domestic matrix of their scale and intimate nature and the universal character of their themes and goals. As if painting could be the vehicle for the expression of a cosmic truth, of the exotic and unfathomable order of the inner fluxes of the world, gradually revealed in the shelter that is the studio.