Shapeshifters / Metamorfoses

UCCLA, Lisboa, 2026. Curated by Katherine Sirois e Ricardo Barbosa Vicente

Diogo Nogueira’s series occupied a particularly important place within Shapeshifters as it transformed metamorphosis into a narrative cycle. Rather than presenting hybridity as a singular apparition, the four works suggest successive states: human figures emerge from vegetation, enter a world of collective and homoerotic play, encounter and fuse with the archetypal figure of the bull, before finally seeming to dissolve back into the ground. Shapeshifting becomes less an exceptional event than a condition of embodied existence: emergence and desire, experience and transformation, dissolution and return.

This reading resonates strongly with Nogueira’s broader practice, which explores image, iconography, gesture and sexuality through a “shared mythology” connecting personal and collective narratives. His work is conceived as a queer celebration in which “alternative” communities and ways of living can emerge, with images operating as forms of collective ritual and ecstatic communion. In this series of works created for Shapeshifters, his mythology becomes almost cosmological: the human body is placed within a larger cycle of vegetal, animal and earthly existence.

The forest is essential to this process. Nogueira draws upon the long tradition of the pastoral as a space outside ordinary social organisation, where bodies can temporarily escape established rules and restrictions. Publications on his work have connected these homoerotic gatherings to Giorgione, Manet, Matisse, Gauguin and Hockney, describing their landscapes as spaces removed from civilisation, social control and morality. Here, however, Nogueira pushes the pastoral toward something more primordial. Nakedness does not only signify erotic freedom: by removing clothes and their social markers, his figures become bodies among other bodies—organisms immersed in water, vegetation, mud, and animal life.

— Katherine Sirois

B is for Blue I, 2026. 170 × 210 cm

B is for Blue II, 2026. 170 × 210 cm

B is for Blue IV, 2026. 170 × 210 cm

Aguas amigas V, 2026. 170 × 210 cm