Hiatus - Vernissage 06.05 - 18:00 Nosbaum Reding Gallery, Luxembourg

4 Rue Wiltheim, 2733 Ville-Haute Luxembourg

In Hiatus, Artist Nuno Lorena constructs a series of still life paintings that evade stillness. What initially appears composed and contained begins, on closer attention, to loosen—objects drift, edges dissolve, time stretches. These works function less as fixed arrangements than, in the artist’s words, “fragments of narrative,” suspended between recollections.

The still life, historically associated with observation and studious control, is here reconfigured as a vessel for personal memory. Lorena approaches it as a way of holding onto what cannot be fully grasped: the scent of the flower in his grandma’s house, a fleeting view peeking out from his boarding school window, residue of experience, and of “home” once it has been left behind. 

Each composition becomes autobiographical, though never explicitly so, carrying proximity to lived detail as an accumulation of signals.

Central to the exhibition is the recurring presence of the sea. Having grown up along the coast of Portugal, Lorena describes his relationship with the sea as something only fully realised through absence. When distance sharpens attachment, memory becomes tidal. The seascapes in Hiatus do not present the sea as picturesque, but as something internalised, unstable and shifting, felt rather than seen.

One painting, suffused in a dense, almost umber orange, the artist recalls a beach in the Algarve after a sudden fire. The horizon blurs, forms dissolve, and the familiar becomes momentarily estranged. In this sense, Lorena’s paintings operate like long-exposure photographs, time condensed into a single, trembling frame.

The exhibition unfolds as a constructed and breathable scene. There is a quiet tension in-between the invitation: the works draw us in through their softness and familiarity, yet resist full legibility. This oscillation mirrors the experience of memory itself—simultaneously accessible and elusive, comforting and destabilising.

Hiatus suggests a temporary interval in which these fragments gather, overlap, and blur. In Lorena’s hands, painting becomes a way of inhabiting that interval—of attending to what surfaces when continuity is interrupted, and what remains when one is, inevitably, elsewhere.

Text by Zilai Zhu