https://fabiocolaco.com Fábio Colaço Tue, 10 Nov 2026 20:19:48 +0000 https://fabiocolaco.com en https://fabiocolaco.com/home Sun, 26 Jul 2020 21:14:05 +0000 Fábio Colaço https://fabiocolaco.com/home <img width="5472" height="3648" width_o="5472" height_o="3648" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/20412922430b1b1bf25b284063b9e7aaeb95b3ab3b722542825c6f688204b6ae/fabiocolaco_untitledutopia_2024_1.jpg" data-mid="219454041" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/20412922430b1b1bf25b284063b9e7aaeb95b3ab3b722542825c6f688204b6ae/fabiocolaco_untitledutopia_2024_1.jpg" /> <img width="5472" height="3648" width_o="5472" height_o="3648" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8e356192eb6da6f8eb0e40e73093725c545cdaf9d20f36b1e2c6bb24f7ac2cf6/fabiocolaco_sisyphusrock_2024_1.jpg" data-mid="219454044" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8e356192eb6da6f8eb0e40e73093725c545cdaf9d20f36b1e2c6bb24f7ac2cf6/fabiocolaco_sisyphusrock_2024_1.jpg" /> <img 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src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/cce4ac8092b1bd4d7f3ac255f349d798bb9ee8e0476c149a7013a69bedf6abb5/fabiocolaco_godshoes-10_2024.jpg" /> <img width="5472" height="3648" width_o="5472" height_o="3648" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/986e98232fe2a1dd2a61975e248de295a493357092032ffcb87c925c8a5d11f0/2.jpg" data-mid="162017990" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/986e98232fe2a1dd2a61975e248de295a493357092032ffcb87c925c8a5d11f0/2.jpg" /> <img width="5472" height="3648" width_o="5472" height_o="3648" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5a57069f103d82e0389b93c3e6455b1fe2dfbd703e2989c03674c43022dd2056/fabiocolaco_darkcloud_2021_0.jpg" data-mid="114493214" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5a57069f103d82e0389b93c3e6455b1fe2dfbd703e2989c03674c43022dd2056/fabiocolaco_darkcloud_2021_0.jpg" /> <img width="2000" height="1336" width_o="2000" height_o="1336" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/21257f6f922196d41672f2d2cf8a9ba3ec23712f6deaab0f615c96f33dbb64e6/FabioColaco_Untitleddark_2020_1.jpg" data-mid="91362833" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/21257f6f922196d41672f2d2cf8a9ba3ec23712f6deaab0f615c96f33dbb64e6/FabioColaco_Untitleddark_2020_1.jpg" /> <img width="4032" height="3024" width_o="4032" height_o="3024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8a961544ac7c12ebdbf72c54da39afe057be40f9502b5567084e3986477f951a/GoldenCent_1.jpg" data-mid="97936934" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8a961544ac7c12ebdbf72c54da39afe057be40f9502b5567084e3986477f951a/GoldenCent_1.jpg" /> <img width="5472" height="3648" width_o="5472" height_o="3648" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cb4b4a3375b46fb012fbc941c3eef6fde5dbb21fc356661da622f646b2d501e8/fabiocolaco_untitledtruth_2024_3.jpg" data-mid="219454043" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/cb4b4a3375b46fb012fbc941c3eef6fde5dbb21fc356661da622f646b2d501e8/fabiocolaco_untitledtruth_2024_3.jpg" /> <img width="5832" height="3888" width_o="5832" height_o="3888" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c3fa2661376d5e1a54b236742a7dd873543b3f97c6769fd48528e020bb53f9a2/FabioColaco_AGodCalledMoney_7.jpg" data-mid="78397887" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c3fa2661376d5e1a54b236742a7dd873543b3f97c6769fd48528e020bb53f9a2/FabioColaco_AGodCalledMoney_7.jpg" /> <img width="5472" height="3648" width_o="5472" height_o="3648" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5a57069f103d82e0389b93c3e6455b1fe2dfbd703e2989c03674c43022dd2056/fabiocolaco_darkcloud_2021_0.jpg" data-mid="114493214" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5a57069f103d82e0389b93c3e6455b1fe2dfbd703e2989c03674c43022dd2056/fabiocolaco_darkcloud_2021_0.jpg" /> <img width="5472" height="3648" width_o="5472" height_o="3648" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/977f92eba02a61682d83260d0b589e739e6d1b5bdc8b8543390074d43085041d/fabiocolaco_untitledxanax_2021_2.jpg" data-mid="123096752" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/977f92eba02a61682d83260d0b589e739e6d1b5bdc8b8543390074d43085041d/fabiocolaco_untitledxanax_2021_2.jpg" /> <img width="5906" height="3938" width_o="5906" height_o="3938" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/07e4f8bf237ae3eaeec55d81374248876c297bc983d81901bed89cfef226ff94/Fabio-Colaco-5.jpg" data-mid="78801788" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/07e4f8bf237ae3eaeec55d81374248876c297bc983d81901bed89cfef226ff94/Fabio-Colaco-5.jpg" /> https://fabiocolaco.com/work Sun, 26 Jul 2020 21:03:47 +0000 Fábio Colaço https://fabiocolaco.com/work Welcome Home, 2026 Wrong Sky, 2026 Still Point, 2026 We Are Living, 2026 Right Way to Nowhere, 2026 Bread to the People, 2026 Mirage, 2026 Post-Europe, 2025 Threshold, 2025 Grace, 2025 Flooded Europe, 2025 Fail, 2025 Truth on the Brink of Collapse, 2025 Who Killed the World?, 2025 Utopia, 2024 Untitled (timeline), 2024 Untitled (1984), 2024God Shoes, 2024 Untitled (concetto spaziale),&nbsp;2024 Faust, 2024 Sisyphus Rock, 2024 Dogma, 2024 Untitled (burning vest), 2024 Untitled (face to face), 2024 Protest Paintings, 2024 Pocket Portraits, 2024 Untitled (truth), 2024 Untitled (holding the void), 2024 Untitled (hell), 2023 Untitled (world domino), 2023 Untitled (world if there was no land), 2023Untitled (sad Musk), 2023 Untitled (Prozac), 2023 Untitled (no future), 2023 Untitled (crisis), 2023 Untitled (listening), 2023 The world is full of Kings and Queens, 2023 Climate Holocaust, 2023Untitled (resistance), 2023 Merry Crisis and a Happy New Fear, 2022 Untitled (link), 2022 Enigma, 2022 Eclipse, 2022 Untitled (no chance), 2022 Untitled (index), 2022 Untitled (rich and poor), 2022 Untitled (bluf), 2022 Untitled (O), 2022Untitled (public debt), 2022 Untitled (debt), 2022 Untitled (Xanax), 2021 Untitled (bread), 2021 Dream (to Inês), 2021 Dark Cloud, 2021 Portraits, 2021 Untitled (guilty), 2021 Untitled (kiss), 2020 Untitled (dark), 2020 Untitled (he is watching you), 2020 Untitled (todo es imaginario), 2020 Disclaimers, 2020 Safe Box Paintings, 2020 It Is Time, 2020Untitled (cut), 2020 Money Blinds You, 2020Untitled (heavy), 2020Untitled, 2020Untitled (crumpled), 2020 Untitled (concetto spaziale), 2020 Untitled (mousetrap), 2020Plastic Bag Balloon (blue), 2020 One Million, 2020 CMYK, 2019-2020Balaclavas, 2019-2020Covers, 2019-2020Meme Paintings, 2019-2020Lost Fund, 2019God Shoes, 2019-2020 Artist’s Praying Hands, 2019A God Called Money, 2019Untitled (euro banknote colors), 2019Welcome, 2019Tower of Babel, 2019Paramount (White House), 2019Eclipse, 2018Upside Down Depression, 2018Ecce Mono, 2018Golden Cent, 2017 A copper-plated golden cent put into circulation, 2017 Untitled (square), 2017Untitled (incomplete), 2017Money Gets Money, 2017Loop, 2017Dirty Money, 2017Untitled (glup! glup!), 2017Trevum, 2016-2017Ostrich, 2016-2017 https://fabiocolaco.com/Welcome-Home Tue, 10 Nov 2026 20:19:48 +0000 Fábio Colaço https://fabiocolaco.com/Welcome-Home <img width="3500" height="2334" width_o="3500" height_o="2334" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4310e9ce595bb9e224529890212fb531eb9c6c0c16334e48e7cd59fabbc00213/fabiocolaco_welcomehome_2026.jpg" data-mid="254216765" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4310e9ce595bb9e224529890212fb531eb9c6c0c16334e48e7cd59fabbc00213/fabiocolaco_welcomehome_2026.jpg" />Welcome Home 2026Tent, UV printed carpet205 x 145 x 100 cm (tent) / 50 x 70 cm (carpet) All images © Fábio Colaço Welcome Home (2026) explores the contradiction between the promise of a home and the reality of precarious shelter. A temporary tent, associated with displacement, emergency and protest, is accompanied by a doormat offering an ironic gesture of hospitality. The work reflects on the growing normalisation of precarious living conditions, where temporary solutions become permanent realities and the exceptional gradually becomes ordinary. https://fabiocolaco.com/wrong-sky Sun, 08 Nov 2026 22:23:45 +0000 Fábio Colaço https://fabiocolaco.com/wrong-sky <img width="3648" height="5472" width_o="3648" height_o="5472" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1b19ed267b4c19cb79c7569144e59e5671d3654fb0893ce6c93d30b0ea3a0da8/fabiocolaco_wrongsky_2026.jpg" data-mid="254166049" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1b19ed267b4c19cb79c7569144e59e5671d3654fb0893ce6c93d30b0ea3a0da8/fabiocolaco_wrongsky_2026.jpg" />Wrong Sky 2026UV print on shoesVariable dimensions All images © Fábio Colaço Wrong Sky (2026) continues the artist’s recurring use of shoes as both sculptural objects and conceptual devices. In this work, the soles of a pair of shoes are UV-printed with an AI-generated image of the sky, creating the uncanny impression of walking directly upon clouds. A familiar and mundane gesture, walking, is transformed into a poetic and destabilising act in which orientation, gravity, and symbolic order appear inverted. The work proposes a subtle yet incisive reflection on perception and truth in contemporary society. By placing the sky beneath the feet, the piece reverses one of the enduring metaphors of political philosopher Hannah Arendt, who described factual truth as “the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us.” For Arendt, factual truth constitutes the shared framework that allows collective reality to exist, a stable horizon against which political and social life can unfold. Without agreement on basic facts, the world loses coherence and reality itself begins to waver. The piece stages the collapse of this stability. The sky, traditionally associated with transcendence, orientation, and openness, is relocated to the sole of the shoe, becoming something stepped on, worn down, and carried across unstable terrain. By using an AI-generated image, the work introduces another layer of uncertainty: the sky itself is no longer a direct representation of reality, but an artificial construction that appears plausible while having no singular real-world referent. Truth no longer appears as a fixed horizon above us, but as an inverted and fragile surface vulnerable to distortion, fabrication, and erosion. In this sense, the sculpture becomes an image of the contemporary condition, an era in which truth is increasingly replaced by competing assumptions, mediated perceptions, and speculative narratives about reality. AI becomes both medium and metaphor: a technology capable of producing convincing images of things that never existed, while simultaneously challenging our ability to distinguish representation from reality. Through the simplicity of its gesture, the work transforms an everyday object into a philosophical proposition. Walking on clouds becomes both impossible and strangely plausible, a mirage sustained by technology, imagination, and belief. The sculpture oscillates between irony and melancholy, suggesting a world in which certainty has dissolved and even the most elementary coordinates of reality can be reversed. https://fabiocolaco.com/still-point-series Fri, 06 Nov 2026 15:13:05 +0000 Fábio Colaço https://fabiocolaco.com/still-point-series <img width="1536" height="1024" width_o="1536" height_o="1024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/645a39b6319e864585f873d33fe7ee577a181e2ebd7880c8e4e389530c2e4d13/fabiocolaco_stillpointseries_1.jpg" data-mid="254071662" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/645a39b6319e864585f873d33fe7ee577a181e2ebd7880c8e4e389530c2e4d13/fabiocolaco_stillpointseries_1.jpg" />Still Point Series 2026Rocks, arrowsVariable dimensions All images © Fábio Colaço In this series of sculptures, the artist stages an apparently impossible encounter: arrows pierce solid rock. Two opposing conditions are forced to coexist: movement and stillness, fragility and permanence, direction and resistance. The rock appears impenetrable: solid, ancient, seemingly immune to change. The arrow embodies trajectory, intention and force, following a line towards a predetermined point. Yet, impossibly, that line continues into the stone. What should resist is penetrated; what should be stopped passes through. Neither element emerges unchanged. This contradiction becomes a metaphor for the forces that shape individual and collective life. The rock can be read as a body subjected to laws, conventions, ideologies and invisible systems of power that determine how bodies should behave, where they belong and in which direction they are expected to move. The arrow becomes a line of authority (a rule, an expectation, a prescribed trajectory) that enters the body and remains embedded within it. The relationship can also be reversed. The stone may stand for the apparent permanence of established structures: political systems, social hierarchies, ideological boundaries, inherited conventions. The arrow then becomes the disruptive gesture, the seemingly minor act capable of penetrating what appeared impenetrable. Resistance is deliberately left unresolved: it is never clear which element resists and which imposes itself. Throughout the series, resistance is understood not as simple opposition but as a negotiation between forces. The stone does not move, yet it must accommodate; the arrow advances, yet its movement ends inside the body it has penetrated. Force produces transformation, but resistance also transforms force. Titles of each sculpture such as Unwritten Law and Invisible Order evoke the rules that govern social life precisely because they have become difficult to see. Minor Act and Little Revolt consider resistance at its smallest scale: change that begins not with a monumental gesture but with a deviation, an interruption, a seemingly insignificant act. Perfect Collapse suggests that the collapse of one structure may be necessary for another to emerge. No Tomorrow, Last Hope and Not Forever introduce time as a political and existential condition, oscillating between the disappearance of the future and the refusal to accept the present as permanent. It challenges the apparent eternity of the stone: no law, ideology or social order is as immutable as it presents itself. Rather than heroic or absolute, resistance here is continuous, physical and often precarious. To resist may simply mean to remain, to deviate, to endure pressure, or to make an opening where none seemed possible. The impossible image of an arrow passing through stone ultimately becomes an image of transformation. Bodies can be disciplined and ideas can harden, but neither is entirely fixed. Walls can be penetrated, orders questioned, structures collapsed. What appears permanent is only permanent until something passes through it. https://fabiocolaco.com/we-are-living Wed, 04 Nov 2026 21:05:17 +0000 Fábio Colaço https://fabiocolaco.com/we-are-living <img width="3500" height="2334" width_o="3500" height_o="2334" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a19dec9ce164c0aca2011c9226c496eb229e28ff037de9058323acb3920557c8/fabiocolaco_weareliving_2026.jpg" data-mid="254132474" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a19dec9ce164c0aca2011c9226c496eb229e28ff037de9058323acb3920557c8/fabiocolaco_weareliving_2026.jpg" />We Are Living 2026White neon147 x 300 x 5 cm All images © Fábio Colaço We Are Living (2026) originates from an anonymous graffiti inscription found in a public space whose improvised hand- drawn lettering has been transposed into the enduring medium of white neon. By preserving the irregularities, hesitations, and imperfections of the original inscription, the work extends the lifespan of an otherwise ephemeral gesture, suspending it in a luminous state that resists disappearance while retaining the vulnerability of its original form. The phrase suggests a profound asymmetry of experience: every catastrophe is lived differently depending on where one stands. An apocalypse is rarely universal; it is often someone else’s present reality while remaining another’s distant abstraction. At the same time, the work proposes that contemporary catastrophes are seldom inevitable. They emerge from political decisions, economic interests, and systems of power whose consequences are unevenly distributed across societies. In this sense, we are not only living through an apocalypse that belongs to someone else, but also through one conceived, shaped, or accelerated by others, whether governments, corporations, institutions, or ideological forces. This translation from spray paint to neon creates a tension between urgency and permanence, between an impulsive act of public expression and its prolonged afterlife. The luminous inscription refuses both the disappearance typical of street interventions and the certainty of a fixed interpretation. Instead, it remains deliberately unstable, oscillating between empathy and detachment, witness and complicity, personal reflection and collective condition. Situated between the visual language of protest and the seductive aesthetics of commercial signage, the work questions how contemporary societies coexist with the constant circulation of images of catastrophe while continuing to normalize the structures that produce them. Rather than announcing the end of the world, it proposes a more unsettling possibility: that the apocalypse is neither a singular event nor a distant future, but an ongoing condition authored through systems of power, experienced unequally, and lived, more often than not, as somebody else’s apocalypse. https://fabiocolaco.com/right-way-to-nowhere Wed, 04 Nov 2026 20:38:39 +0000 Fábio Colaço https://fabiocolaco.com/right-way-to-nowhere <img width="2836" height="3781" width_o="2836" height_o="3781" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/80287ab7ead7e4603eb5004f2d871971bf0c8cd915dc2730d02db8cb8a828046/fabiocolaco_rightwaytonowhere_2026.jpg" data-mid="254077469" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/80287ab7ead7e4603eb5004f2d871971bf0c8cd915dc2730d02db8cb8a828046/fabiocolaco_rightwaytonowhere_2026.jpg" />Right Way to Nowhere 2026Shoes38 x 45 x 29 cm All images © Fábio Colaço Right Way to Nowhere presents a pair of black formal shoes, devoid of any distinctive features, suspended from the ceiling as though it were the floor of a world turned upside down. Arranged to suggest the act of walking, with one shoe positioned slightly ahead of the other, they appear to move forward while remaining motionless, embodying a contradiction between movement and stillness, direction and destination. The work enters into dialogue with Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual (1978), particularly the story of Percival Bartlebooth, who devotes fifty years of his life to a meticulously planned project whose ultimate purpose is to erase every trace of its own completion. His undertaking follows a precise set of rules and procedures, finding its very purpose in the cancellation of its results. This logic also resonates with the myth of Sisyphus, condemned to push a boulder endlessly to the top of a mountain, only to watch it roll back down to its starting point. While in Perec, discipline and repetition form part of a voluntary project designed to leave no trace, in the myth of Sisyphus, effort is imposed as an endless task. In both cases, the relationship between action, purpose and meaning is called into question. By displacing an everyday object into an unexpected context, the work subverts not only its function but also the conventions that shape our perception of space and reality. The shoes, associated with formality, conformity and adherence to certain social norms, appear to follow an established path, even when the points of reference that sustain it have been literally inverted. What initially appears to be an act of walking becomes an absurd exercise in orientation, in which the existence of a direction does not necessarily imply the possibility of reaching a destination. Between Bartlebooth’s methodical project and Sisyphus’s endless labour, the work identifies two distinct manifestations of the same contradiction: the persistence of action in the absence of an outcome. Rather than merely representing the futility of movement, Right Way to Nowhere questions the faith placed in systems of order, conventions and notions of progress that guide contemporary life. Through an apparently simple inversion, the work exposes the fragility of what we take for granted, suggesting, with irony, that we can follow every rule, move in the prescribed direction and still end up nowhere. https://fabiocolaco.com/bread-to-the-people Wed, 27 May 2026 23:51:47 +0000 Fábio Colaço https://fabiocolaco.com/bread-to-the-people <img width="1536" height="1024" width_o="1536" height_o="1024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a5799dad894e6162b151dd8d7b18609e3a9a59cde44a0b53a9d2b2e567e4ebff/fabiocolaco_breadtothepeople_2026_1.png" data-mid="248828540" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a5799dad894e6162b151dd8d7b18609e3a9a59cde44a0b53a9d2b2e567e4ebff/fabiocolaco_breadtothepeople_2026_1.png" /><img width="5472" height="3648" width_o="5472" height_o="3648" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cfea77ed96ab0470a77d9bde0cc12d03caa690aba0b78be0d0fe172b7d2cd31f/fabiocolaco_breadtothepeople_2026_2.jpg" data-mid="248828541" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/cfea77ed96ab0470a77d9bde0cc12d03caa690aba0b78be0d0fe172b7d2cd31f/fabiocolaco_breadtothepeople_2026_2.jpg" />Bread to the People 2026Plinth, red carpet, preserved breads50 x 150 x 150 cm (plinth) / approx. 50 x 130 x 130 (bread) All images © Fábio Colaço A square of red carpet rests on top of a plinth, serving as the surface upon which pieces of bread are carefully arranged. The composition is intentionally restrained, allowing the stark contrast between the opulent fabric and the modest food to emerge as the central visual and conceptual axis of the work. The title, Bread to the People, directly invokes political slogans associated with redistribution, justice, and collective dignity. The phrase recalls a rhetoric historically used to legitimize authority and alleviate perceptions of inequality, often offering reassurance without producing substantial structural change. Within the sculpture, this promise becomes deeply ironic. The red carpet, a conventional emblem of prestige, spectacle, and institutional power, becomes the surface on which bread is displayed. Bread, perhaps the most basic and fragile signifier of human subsistence, occupies a space typically reserved for the performance and celebration of privilege. This juxtaposition exposes the tension between elevated political language and the modest, often insufficient, material conditions to which such language refers. The work also draws upon the Roman concept of panem et circenses (“bread and circuses”), a political strategy through which food and public spectacles were offered to citizens in order to secure social stability and discourage political dissent. By providing basic sustenance alongside continuous entertainment, power could redirect attention away from structural inequalities and civic participation. In Bread to the People, the red carpet evokes this logic of spectacle, while the bread functions as a reminder of how material needs can become entangled with symbolic gestures designed to preserve existing systems of power. The work suggests that the management of public discontent often relies not on addressing underlying conditions, but on carefully orchestrating what is made visible and desirable. The work resonates with Lauren Berlant’s assertion that crisis is not an exceptional rupture but a continuous condition embedded within everyday life. For Berlant, ordinary existence is shaped by ongoing pressures, structural precarity, and normalized forms of endurance. In this context, the bread does not signify abundance; rather, it embodies the bare minimum required to persist within systems that continually defer meaningful social transformation. Positioned upon the elevated surface of the red carpet, the bread becomes a symbol of necessity framed as spectacle, revealing how political promises frequently operate as images rather than concrete interventions. The piece reflects the persistent gap between what is proclaimed and what is materially lived. It stages the relationship between power and need not as a dramatic confrontation, but as a quiet and enduring condition. The bread remains understated and vulnerable, yet it occupies the central locus of display, prompting viewers to consider how societies rely on symbolic gestures to obscure ongoing deprivation. Ultimately, the work suggests that conditions of need are neither exceptional nor distant; they are embedded within the very structures that societies elevate, ceremonialize, and continue to trust. https://fabiocolaco.com/mirage Mon, 18 May 2026 19:19:01 +0000 Fábio Colaço https://fabiocolaco.com/mirage <img width="3648" height="5472" width_o="3648" height_o="5472" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/defa1fec3ebe240caedb9e8a91266a93dcea6cd670a1a92c2996d496354275ba/fabiocolaco_mirage_2026_1.jpg" data-mid="248446024" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/defa1fec3ebe240caedb9e8a91266a93dcea6cd670a1a92c2996d496354275ba/fabiocolaco_mirage_2026_1.jpg" />Mirage 2026UV print on shoesVariable dimensions All images © Fábio Colaço “Mirage” (2026) continues the artist’s recurring use of shoes as both sculptural objects and conceptual devices. In this work, the soles of a pair of shoes are UV-printed with a photograph of the sky, creating the uncanny impression of walking directly upon clouds. A familiar and mundane gesture, walking, is transformed into a poetic and destabilising act in which orientation, gravity, and symbolic order appear inverted. The work proposes a subtle yet incisive reflection on perception and truth in contemporary society. By placing the sky beneath the feet, this piece reverses one of the most enduring metaphors of political philosopher Hannah Arendt, who in “Truth and Politics” described factual truth as “the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us.” For Arendt, factual truth constitutes the shared framework that allows collective reality to exist, a stable horizon against which political and social life can unfold. Without agreement on basic facts, the world loses coherence and reality itself begins to waver. The piece stages the collapse of this stability. The sky, traditionally associated with transcendence, orientation, and openness, is relocated to the sole of the shoe, becoming something stepped on, worn down, and carried across unstable terrain. Truth no longer appears as a fixed horizon above us, but as an inverted and fragile surface vulnerable to distortion and erosion. In this sense, the sculpture becomes an image of the contemporary condition, an era in which truth is increasingly replaced by competing assumptions, mediated perceptions, and speculative narratives about reality. Through the simplicity of its gesture, the work transforms an everyday object into a philosophical proposition. Walking on clouds becomes both impossible and strangely plausible, a mirage sustained by technology, imagination, and belief. The sculpture oscillates between irony and melancholy, suggesting a world in which certainty has dissolved and even the most elementary coordinates of reality can be reversed. https://fabiocolaco.com/post-europe Mon, 03 Nov 2025 09:15:56 +0000 Fábio Colaço https://fabiocolaco.com/post-europe <img width="5472" height="3648" width_o="5472" height_o="3648" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6fe10758546895b54b48734782778f64ff98a259e4c85939c308dc97716b4372/fabiocolaco_post-europe_2025_1.jpg" data-mid="240183915" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6fe10758546895b54b48734782778f64ff98a259e4c85939c308dc97716b4372/fabiocolaco_post-europe_2025_1.jpg" /><img width="5472" height="3648" width_o="5472" height_o="3648" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9e9f206184b6ea186ccb6656b77c631b7ca42a5af3edbff8224d6a63384c6190/fabiocolaco_post-europe_2025_2.jpg" data-mid="240183916" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9e9f206184b6ea186ccb6656b77c631b7ca42a5af3edbff8224d6a63384c6190/fabiocolaco_post-europe_2025_2.jpg" /><img width="5472" height="3648" width_o="5472" height_o="3648" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fb1d46af5e32f718fbe2ea7b0136294628ebc7743d69aafd404a1aa4153a189e/fabiocolaco_post-europe_2025_5.jpg" data-mid="240184329" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/fb1d46af5e32f718fbe2ea7b0136294628ebc7743d69aafd404a1aa4153a189e/fabiocolaco_post-europe_2025_5.jpg" />Post-Europe 2025Plinth, broken transparent glass2 x 193 x 293 cm (sculpture) / 10 x 200 x 300 cm (plinth) All images © Fábio Colaço “Post-Europe” (2025) presents the European Union flag reconstructed from shards of glass, transforming a familiar emblem of unity into an image of rupture and fragility. The work confronts the viewer with the unsettling reality of a project that, once envisioned as a symbol of integration and solidarity, now bears the visible scars of fragmentation. The broken glass destabilizes the flag’s geometry, its sharp edges evoking both danger and irreversibility. What was designed as a shared identity appears fragile, precarious, and violently disrupted. The piece resonates with contemporary anxieties about nationalism, economic disparity, and the erosion of collective ideals, reflecting the collapse of cohesion in a political entity once imagined as unbreakable. Through its stark materiality, Post-Europe transforms a symbol of belonging into a monument to disillusionment. It asks not only what has been destroyed, but also whether anything can be reassembled from the fragments left behind.