The work of João Motta Guedes (Lisbon, 1995) constitutes an ongoing reflection on a set of ideas
and feelings that can broadly be defined as freedom, vulnerability, love, and violence. At times
closely related, at others in explicit contradiction, but always starting from a deeply personal
perspective and from a place of self-exposure, these concepts give rise to a body of work in which
life can be better understood through the metaphor of the journey: a continuous inner journey that is
built on the infinite possibility of individual and collective trajectories which facilitate the
exploration and sharing of experiences about what it means to be and feel human. To this end, he
makes use of a non-hierarchical multiplicity of expressive means – installation, sculpture,
photography, drawing, sound, poetry – in an approach that can be understood as the successor to a
post-conceptual ontology of the artistic object. Yet this programme does not prevent him from
developing a strongly poetic and narrative discourse, in which a dreamlike universe leads us
through a utopian vision of life and the world around us.

In No Feeling is Final, a project the artist developed specifically for his solo exhibition at Galeria
da Boavista, the concept of travelling is understood through the transience of the emotional states
that define human experience. The title of the exhibition is taken from Go to the limits of your
longing, a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, in which the Austrian poet declaims‘Let everything
happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.’ Recognised for a body of
work that celebrates the transcendental union between the world and humanity in a kind of ‘cosmic
space,’ it is no surprise that Rilke lends Motta Guedes the emotional intensity and transcendence
required for the path the artist suggests we take.

This journey begins on the ground floor of the gallery with a triptych of stained-glass windows
which share the title of the exhibition. Working with light in a chromatic way, as matter, and
without denying the place stained-glass windows have always occupied in history, Motta Guedes
represents a group of vaguely human figures in an apparent state of flux or transformation. This
state of potency, permanently fixed in the colours of the painted glass, recovers and reinterprets a
larger narrative of psychedelics and altered states of consciousness as a form of self-knowledge and
discovery, of liberation and potential emancipation. On the top floor we find May I read you a
poem?, a sculpture that does not reveal itself easily, but which on closer inspection reveals a
metallic tangle from which three megaphone-like shapes emerge and contain a poem written and
read by the artist himself. Varyingly hesitant and confident, the texts bear witness to the artist's
inner life, feelings, and desires. A ball of emotions that has taken on a physical form, albeit
uncertain and difficult to define, and which is expressed not in one but in several voices, intensities,
and affects. We might say this is the multiplicity and transience of emotional states turned into a physical body.

This perpetual inward but also outward movement, of going but also of returning, characterised by
uncertainty, by the mystery of discovering what exists within us, but also of what exists beyond
ourselves in the world, is what defines No feeling is final – a sincere attempt to understand who we
are and the place we occupy in the world.

Luís Silva, April of 2024