You were looking for a new kind of example and I wanted to make you happy. I got you a pair of flip-flops. Aren't they lovely? You looked pleased and tried them on. But you were not after footwear; you wanted the ultimate example. You wanted to abolish the need for exemplification altogether. You had ambition. I feared that the perfect example would reduce us to zero but hoped we would then start again. Every day I rose early and brought you the most concrete example I could think of. I brought you a picture of you. You told me to stop looking for examples between the lines. I tried a new pair of shoes. You told me we can't step into the same example twice. I brought you beautiful metaphors and clever similes. You told me the figurative alone would never hold. I even brought you concrete itself. But you said this was no joke. Sometimes, to be honest, your pursuit bored me. I ran out of ideas. I wanted to leave. Find someone else. I thought about putting an end to it by telling you that everything is an example. But I didn't. Instead I kept bringing you new things. I wanted to make you happy. One day I came from the kitchen carrying a bottle. It was water. And you were thirsty. 

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The earth is opening up underneath her little girl’s feet.

I don’t remember why I first decided to write about memory. I suppose it is difficult to ignore the sense of time inscribed in Carole Gibbon’s recent work, a painter who has been active for more than 60 years. Or perhaps the idea emerged when I first looked at Luke Samuel’s paintings: is it a room I once spent time in? A place in one of my dreams? An uncanny interior inviting me, or Carole, to reminisce about our past? But – of course – it is more likely a combination of these, compounded by my own mid-life point, when the might of accumulated experience and memory becomes unavoidable, like trying to dodge a waterfall of time.

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If it were literature, perhaps Xandi’s work would be a poem. Not a mannered, imposing, impenetrable poet-to-poet kind of poem, but a haikai, which combines common language to a fixed structure to distill the beauty of an instant, with no need for metaphors or similes: just the thing as it is. But I don’t think he’s going to like the comparison – a bit overused, no? – so I’m going to change it. If it was literature, perhaps Xandi’s work would be one of those poems made of every day, written by an Angélica Freitas or an Adília Lopes, two experts in turning the ordinary into wonder.

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I couldn’t help but notice she had four fingers. I took a tired-looking mug of hot tea from her hand. All but the missing nail gleamed with shellac. “I am the nipple on the cake”, she spoke unprompted, the undersides of her uneven boobs touching the cold, glossy kitchen surface. Like an ostrich, she was fascinating to watch. “What would happen if you stopped painting?”, I finally asked. “I would grow feathers”, she sighed.  

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I woke up prematurely again. The kitchen felt hollow and groomed. A ten pound note stuck to the fridge, next to a post-it: Please answer if I phone. Beyond the turbid window, the bay tree dimmed my garden beyond any warmth. The roads were closed, the kettle was on and I was making history. A pair of torpid clouds coalesced, rocking an eternal sleep. I watched a diagram of furry hats, the velvet skin of black bears. There was no change of direction, no treasonous deviation. They carried on like a well-choreographed platter of scaleless fish. Shared sacrifice, they clamoured. My phone was cold, lifeless. I opened the camera and my pictures became necessary, yet unexcitable, like drinking tepid water. Centuries of residual water. I needed a rainbow and there it was. An island of my own invention. These were people I knew but didn’t recognise. Reflected on the hazy screen, I looked as smooth and elegant as my grandmother’s bean stew. The TV still blared – oh so quietly – and I didn’t answer the phone. We can’t march ourselves happy.

Lots of people like to read. But not many have the urge to write. The reason most readers are happy with just reading whilst, for some of us, writing cannot be avoided is a matter of concern for Roland Barthes in his famous series of lectures at the Collège de France. Barthes splits the act of reading into two distinct types of pleasure. The first, he says, is “the absolute pleasure of adolescent reading, immersed in a classic novel, the absolute satisfaction of reading”; and the second is “the pleasure of reading that is already tormented by the desire to do the same, in other words by a lack”. 

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This winter, Kupfer has the absolute pleasure to host Between Handrails, Mirela Cabral’s (b. 1992, Salvador, Brazil) first solo show in the UK, which brings together a large group of new paintings and embroideries. The exhibition is the culmination of a three-month residency period in which the artist produced a prolific collection of layered abstractions with sparing but powerful figurative elements. 

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Mirrors are both reflecting and distracting; we look at them as an attempt to decipher the many ways our selves are shaped by internal and external forces, revealing the unavoidable juxtaposition between our self-image and the gaze of others. Her work invites the viewer to engage with her choice of reflective materials as if by saying, in no particular order: don’t look at me, look at you, or don’t look at you, look at me. 

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If I Were You is simultaneously a celebration and a critical examination of the poetic power of a place. Both the allure of a place and the stain of a place[3]. Ghalib’s Vidigal (2017) gives us the only image of Rio in the show. A rare panoramic vista of the Cagarras Islands from Morro do Vidigal. As our eyes move from the hillside to the ocean, the iconic carioca beaches, some of the most expensive real estate on the planet, are nowhere in sight.

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