Teresa Murta: A Taste of Doubt

“The eye is not a passive instrument. It is a body moving through what it sees.”

Teresa Murta’s paintings begin at the point where harmony is never simply a state of order, but something that becomes perceptible only when it is threatened. Her paintings operate on the verge of collapse, introducing elements that intrude the composition and by doing so, unsettle the viewer’s own position.

Murta’s compositions inhabit a narrow threshold between attraction and disturbance, seducing the eye through colour, texture and the sensuality of their forms only to withdraw the promise of harmony they initially seemed to offer. Earthy tones establish a seemingly stable ground while sudden intrusions of pink, blue, orange or acid green threaten a possible sense of familiarity. These colours appear almost foreign to the world they inhabit, yet their disappearance would be equally unsettling. Without them, the painting would settle into agreement; with them, it remains alive.

What emerges is not chaos opposed to order, but a fragile chaosmos: an organisation that is constantly being organised and disorganised at once.

Murta’s paintings do not offer the viewer a hierarchy through which their elements can be comfortably understood. Horizontal and vertical movements coexist; bodies seem to hang, collapse, lie down or surrender to gravity, while other forms stretch, bend and flow as if propelled by invisible forces. The image begins to acquire a choreography of its own. Nothing appears entirely still, even when nothing can be said to be moving. Forms seem to be caught in the middle of transformations that have no clear beginning and no foreseeable end. A body becomes a landscape, a landscape becomes a piece of flesh, flesh becomes vegetation, vegetation becomes paint. Recognition never arrives at a final destination.

The gaze enters Teresa's paintings like a body entering a maze, one whose walls refuse to remain solid. As the eye moves through the image, following a contour, a colour, a fold or the suggestion of a body, the boundaries begin to soften and melt. What seemed to be an obstacle or interruption becomes a passage; what seemed to be enclosed opens up; what appears solid begins to flow. In this maze, perception is not the discovery of a hidden order but the experience of moving through a world whose limits are continuously dissolving, reminding us of the possibility of wonder and wander without shortcuts. They resist the fantasy that there is one correct way, one interpretation capable of bringing everything together. The closer one looks, the less certain the territory becomes.

Murta brings the eye unusually close to the matter of painting: there is rarely enough distance to survey the image from a position of a full overview. The viewpoint has been narrowed leaving the viewer with fragments of something that seems to continue beyond the limits of vision. That's why Murta’s paintings tend to leave us digesting in the liminal space of perception, between our body and the pictorial surface. This is what gives these paintings a strangely lysergic quality: they do not merely represent an altered perception; they seem to induce one. Colours begin to vibrate against one another, forms lose their edges, and the eye feels as though it has become a new surface on which the painting continues to unfold.