«With "Quodlibet", the project designed for the Museum of Neo-Realism, Vila Franca de Xira, the artist once again takes on this deliberate game: reconverting the mimesis of painting in favour of spatial awareness. Taking on the presuppositions dictated by the white cube of the exhibition space, Rui Macedo also tries to deal with the additional challenge imposed by another idiosyncrasy of the Museum's gallery, the fact that it opens onto the small Rua Almeida Garrett, which is adjacent to it, thus admitting the constraints of its "pre-existences" — structural, chromatic and formal, as well as of meaning and memory — associated with the diversity of worn and aged buildings on this artery of the city. This consideration of pre-existing spatial meanings can be seen from the outset in the fact that the artist has not made autonomous objects that produce indifference in relation to space, but rather has sought to respond to the affirmative density of this condition by proposing a set of paintings that reinterpret and certify at the same time a visual reality that is first and foremost physical and presential, verifiable in the very space of the pictorial presentation or its installation.

The central challenge of "Quodlibet" therefore consists of a dialogue or game of visuality inevitably produced between the painting, the exhibition space and its external surroundings, which, due to their strong presence provided by a large glazed surface, acquire an extraordinary value in the perception of the art space itself, confusing it with many aspects, some of them unsuspected, others unexpected. »

David Santos., excerpt from the catalogue essay., 2024

«Rui Macedo, a "heterotopic" (in a certain Borgesian sense) painter, paints and "frames" pictures that exhibit a deceptive transparency], with fine humour he unveils the logic of museums, their strategy of generating timeless fetishes, objects that cease to be so in order to enter into "disinterested perception". Speculating on museums, in the case of this Portuguese artist], also involves introducing anomalies into them.

Rui Macedo's metapictorial installations are, to a large extent, fascinating reworkings of thecabinets d'amateurs], as in the exhibition entitled "Un CuerpoExtraño", which he produced at the Museo de Artes Decorativas in Madrid. His work is a hybrid: arranged between painting and installation, it plays withobjet trouvé,proposes unlikely framings, or changes the scale of the pedestals. Macedo introduces "anomalies" into museums, inviting us to look from an unusual point of view.»

Fernando Castro Flórez, excerpt from the catalogue essay., 2024

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