Artist Talk

Pedro Cera is pleased to present Et fugit ad salices, Gil Heitor Cortesão's twelfth solo exhibition at the gallery. Its title, drawn from Virgil—"and she flees to the willows"—evokes a moment in a pastoral song in which a girl retreats among the trees while ensuring that her flight is witnessed. The gesture is therefore not quite one of escape: withdrawal becomes an invitation and concealment a means of making oneself visible. It is this tension between opposing impulses, between disappearance and disclosure, distance and invitation, that forms the point of departure for the exhibition.