« (…) While Macedo’s paintings are of course real, they speak of a web-like fiction: an imaginary collector, Mr Alexander M., who has amassed a group of works by equally imaginary painters. Sharing the initials that make up Rui Macedo’s own name, these people could be seen as avatars of the artist himself: alter egos, bots. the canvases created by these avatars are multitudinous: lined up, gridded, overlapping, hung high and low, you name it. As an audience, we wander through a physical museum of real paintings that depict seemingly real images, which are generated by the fictitious characters of a real artist. this is meta. Macedo meanders between reality and falsity, the tangible and imaginary, and fiction is the overarching paradigm.

 (…) Macedo plays a game with us and acts as a puppet master of sorts, as we attempt to piece together his puzzle. He observes painting and its traditional attributes, its relationship with architecture and space, and the normative constructs of the museum as we’ve come to recognise it. He references the most recognisable tropes of painting – landscape, portrait, still life, trompe l’oeil – as well as the censoring of art throughout history. He turns these inside out, upends them, so that the museum, its contents and its history become a fiction, a construct, a surreal encounter: a dream. He wants us to ask what is happening behind the walls, in the gaps, in-between the frames – in our imaginations, even. He wants us to consider how paintings have been presented to us and, moreover, why. After all, history is a construct, just as the present is. one thing he doesn’t offer us is answers, but perhaps that’s because in an ever-changing world, there are none. »

Louisa Elderton, excerpt from the catalogue essay, 2017

« In a spatial fiction, in a gallery space transformed into a museographic environment, Rui Macedo imagines a museum of its own, an imaginary museum, where a collector called Alexander M., embodied by the author himself, gathers the works of five artists: M.A.R, M.M.R.A., A.A.R.M., R.M.A. and R.A.M.A.. In a staged exhibition storyline, Rui Macedo creates wandering simulations between things and us, between the visible and the intangible. In an ironically intelligent way, we are gradually introduced to the artists who give substance to the exhibition.»

Cláudia Camacho, excerpt from the catalogue essay, 2017

«(...) The whole exhibition is a stage deception, a scene-setting machine for a drama in which painting is a character along with its seduced partner, the viewer. And so painting fulfils the greater purpose of representation, the completion of a vision, the materialisation of a dream. It is a whole creative territory in which the visitor is involved, room by room.

(...) Rui Macedo seems not only to be following Parrhasius, but above all to be conjuring up and characterising a legend of painting, with its moods and spells, its prohibitions and bonds. He calls upon the great and the small of history, he raises its power, its power to amaze, and he succeeds in raising from the human dust and the shadows the window of painting, a window onto itself, an opening that allows a certain immortality through new abysses, new collections, future ruins, pieces almost without explanation.»

João Paulo Queiroz, excerpt from the catalogue essay, 2017