Image: Galeria Pedro Cera, Lisbon
Gil Heitor Cortesão’s exhibition ‘Et fugit ad salices’ is on view through November 19, 2026, at Galeria Pedro Cera in Lisbon. The presentation is Cortesão’s twelfth solo exhibition at the gallery.
The exhibition takes its title from Virgil’s phrase “and she flees to the willows,” which evokes a girl retreating among trees while ensuring that her flight is witnessed. The paintings similarly present landscape as a possible temporary refuge from the city beyond the gallery walls, while never allowing viewers to fully disappear into it.
That constructed landscape takes its most expansive form in the polyptych ‘Et fugit ad salices’ (2026), which dominates the main room and unfolds through the viewer’s movement along its length: as viewers move, images shift and the landscape is continuously reconstituted, behaving less like a fixed picture than like music—a sequence that can be entered at any point, followed forwards or retraced, without ever quite arriving where it began.
Nearby, the freestanding ‘Selva’ (2026) inhabits the same impossible terrain through a different spatial logic, with its verticality interrupting the polyptych’s horizontal movement so that flight becomes a vertical gesture and refuge emerges as a counterpoint to exposure.
The exhibition text also gives ‘fugit’ a double meaning: it refers both to the flight in the exhibition’s title and to time’s passage, the irreparable time that passes and never returns. Just as several places merge into a single landscape, several moments converge on a plane holding countless futures, all still possible though only one will come to pass.
