Tiago Duarte: Victory Over The Sun

A small projectile is fired from 30 metres. The target: a black square, 20 x 20 cm. A loud snap. A 30-06 cartridge rips through the bottom right corner. This is not random violence—it’s a precise act, following instructions from artist Tiago Duarte to the curator of this exhibition and his friend, a hunter and a farmer.

It recalls an earlier gesture: Hunter S. Thompson once shot a print made by Ralph Steadman, his partner in Gonzo journalism. Here, Duarte’s own print, Morte ao Sol (2024), takes aim at another mythic figure—Kazimir Malevich. Specifically, his Black Square from 1915, the Suprematist zero, the moment painting “reset” itself. Duarte’s square is smaller, humbler, and now—pierced.

Victory Over the Sun takes its name from the 1913 Russian Futurist opera for which Malevich designed the sets. It is also, in Duarte’s hands, a farewell of sorts. “I am a painter that uses print,” he says. “The thought behind the work concerns the history of painting, not print.” But here at the worm, printmaking is not an afterthought—it’s a place of experiment, disruption, and reinvention.

Following its first showing at Irmã Feia in Cacilhas, Portugal, this exhibition comes north to Aberdeen with four works and a new commission, selected over three in-depth studio visits. As curator at Peacock & the worm, I seek artists who push the limits of the medium. Not simply printmakers, but artists who treat the press as a site of Fine Art, ephemera, resistance, and rupture—from punk zines to political posters, concrete poetry to hand-cut stencils.

I first met Tiago four years ago during a fleeting visit he made to our print studio. I later visited him in Cacilhas, where he laid out 20 years of work across two massive tables. It wasn’t cacophony—it was overload. Series after series of multiples, techniques colliding. What drew me in were the works born from constraint: minimal materials, maximum effect.

Instead of conventional inks, Duarte might run lithographic oil stabiliser through the press on cheap cartridge paper, again and again, until the fibres strain and the surface shimmers with fatigue. Studio technicians worldwide would shudder. Other artists watched, horrified. But Duarte stopped at the precise moment before collapse. The results are luminous, haunted. The Varnishes (2013) glimmer with stress, their torn surfaces catching the light. Leaning them against a window reveals ghostly transparencies—like celestial maps or brain scans.

Elsewhere, The Persistence of Things (2011) offers three monotypes in Yves Klein blue. Put through the press so many times the top layer becomes translucent, the paper folds in on itself. The work ends not when Duarte decides—but when the paper does. When the material says “enough.”

On the final wall: Drop (2012). The black square returns, now accompanied by a white one. Onto each, white spirit is dropped. As it evaporates, it leaves behind circular voids—subliminal zeros at the heart of solid forms. Suns extinguished. Icons undone. Two dead stars—shot, like the first one—by a farmer’s rifle.

– Nuno Sacramento, 2025