The Artist, the Model and the Voyeur

A young painter studying in London works as a model for other painters. Ten years later, at an exhibition of his own work, he crosses paths again with one of the artists he had once posed for — who only then discovers that his former model was also a painter. During their meeting, the younger artist proposes to pose once more, on the condition that he be allowed to bring three cameras with him to document the sessions from his own point of view — a way to capture images he had imagined during his silent hours as a model, and to generate material for future work.

Over the course of three days, Rui Miguel Leitão Ferreira and Diccon Swan will live and work together within this dual, ambiguous, and at times contradictory condition, in which each becomes simultaneously model (the one observed and represented) and author (the one who observes and represents) — in other words, the one who gives visibility.

This exhibition emerges from that project, where, through dense and materially rich painting-objects created from those recorded images, Rui Miguel Leitão Ferreira stages an unexpected reversal of the traditional power dynamics between artist and model. He transforms the latter — typically a passive figure subjected to the artist’s scrutinising gaze — into an active agent within the creative process.

We too — drawn into this visual game of gazes and counter- gazes, at once opposing and complementary — are invited to become voyeurs: observers of a visual experience in which narrative, bodies, and matter dissolve into one another.