On the occasion of the exhibition Fogo Fumo, Tiago Mestre's solo show held at Gomide&Co from June 7th to August 9th, 2025, the gallery produced an audiovisual piece featuring the artist’s reflections on his career, his work, and the development process of the show.
Fogo Fumo is the first solo show by Tiago Mestre at Gomide&Co. With critical essay written by Veronica Stigger, the exhibition consists of a large site-specific installation, with different ceramic sculptural sets occupying the gallery’s entire exhibition space. The artist starts from a reflection on the tradition of Portuguese ceramics, with particular attention to the long tradition of pottery in the Alentejo, where he was born and raised, proposing a reworking that puts historical, social, and cultural aspects of the objects into perspective.
In the exhibition, Mestre focuses on objects that are no longer in a stable condition, presenting themselves as vestiges of a cycle interrupted in time. A steel construction beam crosses the exhibition space and acts as an axis around which different ceramic sculptures are organized, based on utilitarian pieces from Portugal's popular pottery universe. “If, through closer observation, one should realize that this set of artworks does not constitute a landscape, the sensation, however, remains of a cave and of prehistory,” comments Stigger in her text for the exhibition.