« Moving away from the modern cube, Oscar Niemeyer proposed spaces with organic shapes and sinuous curves, with large lines that integrate the inside and the outside, bringing the landscape into the architecture. If these characteristics make his buildings extremely pleasant to use and to perceive in built spaces blessed with natural light, they can be difficult to achieve in exhibition spaces, where nature can interfere or compete with the works. The Niterói Museum of Modern Art can be considered a typical and extreme example of Niemeyer's style, since, in addition to having all the characteristics mentioned above, its entire outer wall is a curve open to the city of Rio de Janeiro, facing the sea and embraced by the mountains. In this way, the Niterói MAC is almost an anti-museum, since most of the people who go there want to look at the view, turning their backs on the works.

How can an artist go beyond this beauty? Rui Macedo decided to create an exhibition of paintings that, as a whole, simulates an exhibition project. At the same time, through the way he arranged the canvases and the text, he developed a real dialogue with the space: the exhibition could not be held anywhere else without major adaptations. He established a meta-language through a series of allusions to the processes of the works and the exhibition itself, poetically and critically linking artistic production to the system that legitimises it.

Opposite the window, running along the walls, he placed a passage from Petrarch's Ascent of Mont Ventoux, which deals with the relationship to landscape as an experience, radically different from passive observation.

(...) The physical, perceptual and intellectual games that Macedo sets up in these paintings, in the formal and thematic dialogues established between them and in their relationship with the structure of the museum, are at once subtle and complex, difficult and playful. He creates a new and different experience of the exhibition space and of the works themselves. These latest works, by virtue of their seeming "unfinished" or even "not yet begun" aspect, invite the viewer to take the place of both the artist and those who supposedly put the exhibition together, and to enter into the poetics of each of them. »

Icleia Borsa Cattani, excerpt from the catalogue essay, 2014