Two Shows, One Townhouse: Notas de Rodape & Undertones
Opening Night on Rua de Sao Bernardo
There’s something about arriving at a gallery opening and realising you’re walking into not one but two exhibitions at once. The Jahn und Jahn / Encounter shared space on Rua de Sao Bernardo does this thing where each gallery runs its own show simultaneously under the same 19th-century roof, and on the evening of February 7th both programmes opened together. I came for Notas de Rodape on the Jahn und Jahn side — specifically for Antonio Julio Duarte’s work — but it was the Encounter rooms that ambushed me first.
The patio was already buzzing when I got there. People between the rooms, drinks, the kind of warm Lisbon evening that makes a gallery opening feel like it’s actually about something beyond the art. But once I stepped inside, the conversations faded.
The Charcoal That Stopped Me: Undertones (Encounter Contemporary)
February 7 — March 14, 2026
Undertones brings together three artists — Nicolas Feldmeyer, Diogo Pimentao, and Neha Vedpathak — around a deceptively simple premise: what can drawing still do? The show reflects on the possibilities and diversity of contemporary drawing practice, a “subtle questioning of drawing’s underlying structures.” All three artists push the medium somewhere unexpected, but it was Feldmeyer’s work that physically stopped me.
Upstream — Nicolas Feldmeyer
Nicolas Feldmeyer’s Upstream (2025) is the largest charcoal drawing he’s ever made — 104 by 163 centimetres of charcoal on paper that commands the wall it hangs on. What I find fascinating about Feldmeyer is the route he took to get here: he trained as an architect at ETH Zurich, worked at Herzog & de Meuron and Peter Markli’s practice, before pivoting to fine art (a Fulbright at San Francisco Art Institute, then an MFA with distinction from the Slade in 2012). That architectural thinking never left. His work is obsessed with the poetics of space and place, with light as something almost material — mouldable, tactile, with haptic qualities you can almost feel through the paper.
Standing in front of Upstream, what struck me was how the charcoal renders light as something architectural. It’s not illustration of a space — it constructs one. The scale matters. In reproduction this would read as a drawing; in person it reads as an environment. Feldmeyer won the Saatchi New Sensations First Prize in 2012 and his work sits in the British Museum and the V&A, but none of that prepares you for the physical presence of a large charcoal piece in a quiet room. The grain of the paper, the density where charcoal builds up, the places where it thins to almost nothing — these are decisions that only make sense at full scale.
Drawing Beyond the Page
The other two artists in Undertones deserve attention too. Diogo Pimentao — born in Lisbon in 1973, trained at Ar.Co (the same school as Antonio Julio Duarte, which feels like more than coincidence in this building) — does something extraordinary with graphite and paper. His method, which he calls “blind drawing,” involves shading lengthy strips of paper with graphite until they acquire a metallic sheen, then folding, knotting, and layering them into three-dimensional structures. The result looks like welded metal but it’s paper and pencil. It completely dissolves the boundary between drawing and sculpture. His work is in the Centre Pompidou, which tells you how seriously the art world takes this practice.
Neha Vedpathak, born in Pune, India, now based in Detroit, works with Japanese mulberry paper through a process she calls “plucking” — separating individual fibres using a pushpin. There’s something almost meditative, even spiritual, about it. The patience required is staggering. Her pieces hang like delicate organic membranes, somewhere between a drawing that disintegrated and a textile that never quite formed.
What makes Undertones work as a show is that all three artists treat drawing as thinking — not as a step toward something else, but as the thing itself. Mark-making as a way of understanding space, material, and time.
Footnotes as Method: Notas de Rodape (Jahn und Jahn)
February 7 — March 14, 2026 Curated by Luiza Teixeira de Freitas
The title says everything about the curatorial intent. Notas de Rodape — “Footnotes” — is built from what typically remains at the margins: fragments, deviations, interruptions, and ways of thinking that resist linear organisation. Curator Luiza Teixeira de Freitas describes it as “a space of discontinuous, open and relational reading,” like annotated pages where meaning extends beyond the primary text into lateral commentary.
Eight artists — Sara Bichao, Catarina Dias, Antonio Julio Duarte, Carlos Noronha Feio, Julius Heinemann, Raphaela Melsohn, Navid Nuur, and Jorge Queiroz — are presented not as a group with a shared style but as a constellation. The Walter Benjamin line the exhibition invokes is perfect: “Ideas relate to objects as constellations relate to stars.” You move through the rooms and the connections emerge laterally, between works that don’t explain themselves.
What I love about the curatorial approach is its honesty about how we actually experience art in a group show — jumping between fragments, returning to images, accepting deviation as a method. The works reject immediate transparency. They use incomplete gestures, fragmentary processes, open structures. It’s the opposite of a show that tells you what to think.
Antonio Julio Duarte — The Photograph That Knows It’s a Photograph
I came here for Antonio Julio Duarte and his work didn’t disappoint. Born in Lisbon in 1965, Duarte studied photography at Ar.Co between 1985 and 1989, then at the Royal College of Art in London on a Gulbenkian scholarship in 1991. He’s been exhibiting since 1990, steadily building one of the most distinctive bodies of work in Portuguese photography.
What makes Duarte’s practice so compelling is his self-awareness about the medium. He deliberately uses flash rather than tripods — he wants you to know you’re looking at a photograph, not a transparent window onto reality. His images of urban environments carry dystopian undertones without ever tipping into spectacle: buildings, streets, artificial nature, crowds, scenes that suggest something fraying at the edges of the ordinary. As he once put it, his photographs should be “vaguely familiar, but plant the seeds for every other kind of interpretation and meanings without offering too many elements.”
That tension — between recognition and mystery, between the documentary and the uncanny — is exactly what his work in Notas de Rodape delivers. His images feel like footnotes to a city you think you know. Lisbon seen through Duarte’s flash becomes a place that’s simultaneously familiar and estranged, everyday and science-fictional. There’s a lineage here that runs through his books: Oriente/Ocidente (1995), Peepshow (1999), Lotus (2001), White Noise (2011), Japan Drug (2014), Against the Day (2019) — decades of restless looking at cities and finding the uncanny hiding in plain sight.
His work is held by the Serralves Foundation, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the Portuguese Centre of Photography, and the Musee de la Photographie in Charleroi, among others. But what matters more than the CV is the consistency — a photographer who has spent over thirty years refining a single obsession: what happens when a flash interrupts reality and the photograph reveals something the eye alone would miss.
Sara Bichao — Sculpture as Emotional Channel
The other work that stopped me was by Sara Bichao. Born and based in Lisbon, Bichao studied painting at Faculdade das Belas Artes de Lisboa (BA 2008, MA 2011), but what she makes now resists any single category. She describes her practice through emotional channels: to heal, to purge, to perpetuate, to play. That’s not art-speak — it’s a genuine description of what happens in her work.
Bichao creates sculptural forms with a chromatic atmosphere entirely their own — sometimes activated through performative actions, sometimes left as silent presences in the room. What I find remarkable is her approach to materials: they’re collected, offered, sometimes stolen, or salvaged from recycled and organic sources. There’s something alchemical about how she transforms found things into objects that pulse with memory and bodily presence.
Her recent trajectory tells you where she’s heading. In 2024 alone, she had Lightless at the Serralves Foundation in Porto — an almost immersive environment where you walked among huddled bodies on the floor, faces watching you in dim light, a suspended cocoon that seemed to imprison its own history, blue LED hoses forming meandering designs across the ceiling. The questions that show raised — about hope and the lack of it, light and darkness, presence and absence — feel directly connected to what she’s doing in Notas de Rodape.
She also showed Diver’s Flight at Galeria Filomena Soares and Square Root at Appleton, both in Lisbon. Her work is in the collections of Fundacion ARCO, the Serralves Foundation, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the MAAT/EDP Foundation, and the Antoine de Galbert Collection in France. She’s also been in residency at Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris, Residency Unlimited in New York, and Finisterrae in Ouessant.
What draws me to Bichao’s work is how it sits in a room. Her pieces don’t demand attention — they inhabit space. In the context of Notas de Rodape, surrounded by Duarte’s urban flash photography and Queiroz’s drawings, her sculptural presences felt like the emotional anchor of the whole show. The footnotes that carry the real weight.
Two Shows Talking to Each Other
What makes this evening memorable isn’t just the individual works — it’s the accident of proximity. Undertones asks what drawing can still be; Notas de Rodape asks what happens when you build an exhibition from margins and interruptions. Walking between the two, through that 19th-century sequence of rooms with their worn wooden floors and plaster mouldings, I kept noticing echoes. Feldmeyer’s charcoal architecture and Duarte’s flash-lit cities both reveal spaces that feel simultaneously real and constructed. Pimentao’s graphite sculptures and Bichao’s salvaged-material forms both refuse to stay inside their medium. Even the curatorial philosophies rhyme — Undertones as the quiet frequencies beneath drawing, Notas de Rodape as the text that lives in the margins.
This is what the shared-space model at Rua de Sao Bernardo does at its best: it creates conversations that no single gallery could plan. Two programmes, two sensibilities, one building — and the dialogue writes itself.
Jahn und Jahn / Encounter Contemporary Rua de Sao Bernardo 15, 1200-823 Lisboa Wednesday — Saturday, 12pm — 7pm Free admission