UPCOMING
Opening July 5th, 2026,  6PM
 LAVOR
with curtain paintings by Fredrik Værslev, textile works from the collection of Sarah Affonso, and the documentation of a Jeffrey Perkins/ João Simões  collaborative performance

 

Figura Avulsa is pleased to present LAVOR, a group exhibition bringing together curtain paintings by Fredrik Værslev, early 20th-century lenços de Viana (or lenços dos namorados) from the collection of Sarah Affonso, and documentation of a collaborative performance by Jeffrey Perkins and João Simões. The exhibition opens on Sunday, July 5th, 2026, at 6 PM.

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Værslev's latest works are long strips of painted cotton, hung bunched as curtains. They refer back to an early memory: the bright fabrics his mother chose for the windows of his childhood home, which seemed to him, before he had words for it, deliberately artful. In small-town Norway in the 1980s that was as close as anything came to art. The memory is not incidental; Værslev's caustic, workaday experiments in high-end painterly abstraction have always also been a question of class.

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Painting now tends to justify itself in one of two ways: abstraction argues about how images are made and circulated, figuration argues about who gets represented. Værslev's curtains take neither job. They hang in the gallery the way curtains hang in a house, as furnishing; what they record is the making of their own fabric rather than a position in the argument. If that is a retreat into the interior, it is a deliberate one.

Interwoven with these works are early 20th-century lenços from the collection of Sarah Affonso, the modernist painter who also worked extensively in embroidery. Popularly known as lenços dos namorados, these hand-embroidered kerchiefs from the Minho region are less narrowly romantic than the name suggests. The artist and researcher Sara Brandão prefers the plainer name lenços de amor: the loves stitched into them include friendship, self-love, jealousy, revolt, and longing. "Not that there is anything wrong with embroidering for a boyfriend," she explains, "but these women asserted themselves through text when they could not go to school. They embroidered the access they did not have."

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The verses often keep the phonetic spelling of regional speech. Passed discreetly to a beloved, or kept for oneself, they were declarations of affection, longing, and independence. Affonso grew up in Viana do Castelo; she embroidered and knitted throughout her life, and the motifs of these textiles recur in her modernist compositions. In LAVOR the lenços appear as labor in two senses: the work of the needle, and the work of women who wrote themselves into cloth when other means were closed to them.

 

Anchoring the exhibition is the documentation of a collaborative performance by Jeffrey Perkins and João Simões, published as a magazine titled Mobile. The documented action is the repainting of a room from green back to white. Neither artist has much affection for painting; both come out of a moment when it stood for bourgeois convention, the obstacle to anything new. It appears in their performance accordingly, not as a medium but as a task: the coat of white that returns a room to use. That the task rhymes with Værslev's curtains is one of the exhibition's ironies. From opposite directions, the painter and the performers arrive at the same place: painting as work done to a room.

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The exhibition takes its title from an old word for ornamental handwork. It proposes no thesis about labor; it puts three kinds of it in one room: curtain-making, embroidery, house-painting.

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