« (...) The idea of an exhibition secreted inside another exhibition intrigued me. But when I got to lisbon to see what Macedo had done, I was taken by surprise. I saw things in a different way: it seemed to me that, far from enclosing his exhibition inside “Beyond Surrealism,” Macedo had, rather, nested “after Surrealism” inside his own installation “(Land)scaping Normative Thinking.” and in doing so, I might add, he had (without ever painting in anything like a Surrealist manner) taken the Surrealism of the historical show to a further level – creating a Surrealism squared, you might say. In a sense, Macedo proves the contemporary relevance of Portugal’s heritage of Surrealist painting by way of what my Brazilian friends would probably refer to as a form of cultural anthropophagy – by metaphorically eating it and thereby incorporating it into the body of his own new installation.

To some extent, it would not be inaccurate to say that Macedo has used the works by cruzeiro Seixas, Mário cesariny, antónio dacosta, carlos calvet, Marcelino vespeira, eduardo luíz, paula Rego, and graça Morais
as readymade in the duchampian sense – or rather,
he has used the exhibition of their work, curated by Raquel Henriques da Silva, as one great and multifaceted readymade.

(...) Macedo certainly shares this understanding of painting as an intellectual phenomenon with leonardo, Magritte, and dimitrijevic, among others. But I suspect his interpretation of the idea is closest to Magritte’s. With the Belgian artist he shares, for one thing, an inclination toward a style of painting that is effectively neutral. that is, both paint in a way that will at least at first appear somewhat anonymous, even conventional – with a style that tries not to call attention to itself as such, so that whatever it presents will be immediately taken by the viewer at first value. This is a harder trick to pull off than it might seem. »

excerpt from the exhibition catalogue essay by Barry Schwabsky, 2017