This exhibition presents an overview of the nearly 60-year career of artist Roberto Magalhães (1940). His poetics is characterized by a distortion of the real, through which he makes us perceive how grotesque and yet paradoxically hilarious reality can be. The shapes of his characters, portraits, self-portraits, objects and landscapes appear dissolved, extended, contracted, funny and notoriously out of order. They are fictional characters and scenes that nonetheless construct a strong associative link with reality. In effect, there is no evident distinction between fiction and reality in his work; they blend together, even as they complement and feed off one another.

The exhibition is divided into various zones, each reflecting an interest the artist has reflected in his art over the course of his career: the face as a space of dysfunction; masking; mysticism (and not precisely surrealism); imaginary machines and their absurd dynamics; and soft architecture.

Ministro do Tempo [Minister of Time] (1976) and Ninguém [No One] (2008) are works that represent the idea of dysfunction. In the former, the details of a man’s face are displaced by 90°, in keeping with the overall tone balanced between the uncanny and the comedic. In Ninguém, a man’s face seen in profile lacks eyes and eyebrows, thus revealing a state of blindness. Commenting on dysfunction – when, for example, the eyes no longer tell us clearly what is before us – is also an allusion to the times of violence, repression and fear.

Roberto’s recent works have headed off toward a fantastic and mechanical universe. In some, we see the choice of an industrial environment, with shapes set loose in space, creating their own rhythms, associating chaos with randomness. In recent years the artist’s work has reflected this ungroundedness, the choice to leave the forms floating as though they had a life of their own, associating the world of the machine to an organism.