The great Portuguese artist who reconstructs a Via Crucis for his exhibition in Venice

Portuguese artist Pedro Cabrita Reis presents "XIV Steps" at the Magazzino del Sale 3 – Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia during the 61st Venice Biennale. The exhibition features a new cycle of fourteen diptychs inspired by the structure of the Via Crucis (Stations of the Cross), arranged in a linear, processional path that emphasizes rhythm, distance, and repetition. Developed with Luca Berta and Michael Short, the works blend painting, materiality, and spatial construction, using dense layers of violet, dark red, black, and orange punctuated by large black diagonals that evoke architectural elements and tension.

The show matters because it reaffirms Cabrita Reis's position within a European tradition—alongside artists like Antoni Tàpies and Anselm Kiefer—that uses matter, surface, and spatial construction to evoke memory and human fragility. However, the article critically notes that the project's formal compactness also reveals a limitation: by filtering contemporary violence through the universal grammar of the Via Crucis, the work remains abstract and symbolic, avoiding direct engagement with today's concrete images of war, destruction, and migration.