Exhibition “Nuno Júdice – The Pleasure of Images”

Nuno Júdice – The Pleasure of Images” is the name of the exhibition that the Museum of Portimão opens on September 20, this year, at 17:00 pm and which can be visited until January 18, 2026.

Curated by José Gameiro, Manuela Júdice and Filipa Leal, this exhibition invites us to cross Nuno Júdice’s writing as if it were a road always parallel to that of some of his traveling companions.

The Portuguese Graça Morais, Júlio Pomar, Jorge Martins, Rui Chafes, Manuel Amado, Duarte Belo and the French Bernard Cornu, Colette Deblé and Julie Ganzin, are some of the artists in this exhibition, which includes unpublished poems by Nuno Júdice and testimonies from names such as the actor and director Luís Miguel Cintra or Donatien Grau, Advisor to the Presidency of the Louvre Museum, for contemporary programs. The documentary films “Eco, Nuno Júdice”, by Rita Féria and Teresa Júdice da Costa and “Nuno Júdice,3”, from Arquivo-RTP, recorded in the Program “Com Todas as Letras”, from August 1975, coordinated by Eduardo Prado Coelho, Manuel Alberto Valente and Manuel Costa Silva, will also be shown.

Throughout his life, Nuno Júdice drew, made collages and photographed, along with his poetic production. The works are in the more than 20 unpublished notebooks of his estate. One of these pages, at least, can be seen for the first time in the exhibition “Nuno Júdice – The Pleasure of Images”, at the Museum of Portimão, from September 20th. The page includes the poem (not only in shades of blue) “Derrapagem” and a date: 30/12/2015.

Ten years later, this poem inspired Manuela Pimentel to create a homonymous work, which will be shown for the first time in this exhibition. But the painter from Porto, one of the youngest represented in the exhibition, already had a work inspired by another poem by Nuno Júdice, perhaps one of the most famous: “Recipe to make the blue”. This poem begins like this:

 “If you want to make blue,/ take a piece of sky and put it in a large pot,/ that you can take to the horizon;/ then stir the blue with a remnant of red/ from the dawn, until it falls apart; (…)”.

It is not the only poem we find in this exhibition: an exhibition to see and to read. Upon arrival, an unpublished typewriter, in shades of blue, from 1967. We can read: “A Chagall, le poète et son double, blue face, horse. Russia./ The port of Lisbon with cranes and seagulls, cloudy day, without horizon”.

It was written at the time of his first trip to Paris, with the actor and director Luís Miguel Cintra, a colleague and friend throughout his high school time (and they went to university together). Cintra is one of the voices that we can hear in this exhibition, in addition to Graça Morais, Jorge Martins or the Louvre programmer Donatien Grau.

In 2023, Nuno Júdice received an invitation from Donatien Grau, who was preparing, at the Louvre Museum, the edition of a book of poems raised by the museum itself or by works exhibited in it. The book “100 Poètes d’aujourd’hui: Poésie du Louvre” was born, in which Júdice participates with the poem “The Inspiration of the Poet”, alongside names such as Tahar Ben Jelloun, Jon Fosse, Hélène Dorion and Jacques Darras. 

The work reaches the hands of Nuno Júdice a few days before his death in Lisbon, at the age of 74. As the poet born in the Algarve (Mexilhoeira Grande) wrote in 1949, in the verses that were the basis of a collaboration with Rui Chafes: “Look: if the interval of the stars/restores to you the image of nothingness, don’t stop/to fix it.”

(Curators: José Gameiro, Manuela Júdice and Filipa Leal)