"Not too far from this day, and not far from where we are now, a whale washed ashore—immense and silent, as if the sea had offered it to humankind as a gift. In no time, people began arriving from all directions, drawn by that rare and never-before-seen phenomenon. The air around it felt suspended, as if time itself had paused for a moment to witness it.
'We thought we were only seeing an animal that had washed ashore: we were looking at a dead planet.´ ¹

The whale symbolizes depth and ancestry, a colossal presence that has fascinated humanity since the beginning. In literature, it has represented the indomitable force of nature in Moby Dick (Herman Melville); or a dark space of transformation and rebirth in Pinocchio (Carlo Collodi). Its monumentality and intensity gave rise to the British expression ´A Whale of a Time'. ´A Whale of a Time' as an idiom, evokes images of pleasure and intense fun. Behind this apparent brilliance, however, lurks the weight of current times, a world heading for collapse. We live in dark times, times of tension, uncertainty
and confusion. We live in times of wars, both visible and invisible, of hatred, intolerance and disinformation. Never has the world been so connected as it is today and, paradoxically, never have we felt so alone. Swallowed up and trapped in a darkness that has devoured us. Like Pinocchio, trapped in the belly of the whale, we can also understand this place of ours as an opening for hope and rebirth.

Abel Mota continues to use painting as a territory for play and discovery, as a way of activating his inexhaustible curiosity about the world. His practice is driven by a meticulous attention to images and objects from different origins: from Portuguese, Brazilian or Nordic folklore, to Eastern cinema, passing through masks and art facts that he collects. The result is an eclectic, disconcerting, increasingly dense and spontaneously surprising visual lexicon.
In ´A Whale of a Time´ Abel Mota presents us with a fictional bathing environment, in which the idyllic setting of the beach becomes the stage for new performances. This is not, however, an obvious celebration of leisure and the lightness of summer. The unbridled fun enunciated by the English expression in the title comes hand in hand with an underlying irony. As in ´Dear Beasts´, Abel Mota starts from the idea of metamorphosis, now filtered through maritime imagery. The individual and articulated narrative between the various paintings is transformed into a space where bodies and creatures are diluted, where skin is both a disguise and a character. In this new bathing bestiary, the figures seduce us with the same duality as the legendary creatures: sometimes innocent, sometimes about to devour us. Abel Mota offers us a visual game where the pleasure of the image is mixed with the suggestion of another imminent reality.
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The sea, symbol of infinity and mystery, is revealed here as a space of transformation.
“A Whale of a Time” becomes a contemporary fable in which all the actors in the work - creator, creation and spectator - cross paths on unstable ground. Here we contemplate Gadenne's whale, which also appears to us as a symbol of ruin, of the end of a world as we knew it.

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  ^{1 quote taken from PAUL GADENNE, Baleia (p.41)}

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  ^{Text for the exhibition by the curator Diogo Ramalho}

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