Galerie Maubert presents The commensals, the third solo exhibition by Portuguese painter José Loureiro at its Paris gallery, on view from 5 September to 31 October 2026. A leading figure on the Portuguese art scene, the artist recently received a major retrospective at the Frac Grand Large – Hauts-de-France, spanning three floors and nearly 2,000 square metres.

The exhibition at Galerie Maubert brings together, among other works, the artist’s latest series, The commensals: oil paintings on canvas and paper in which playful forms emerge and interact, hovering between abstraction and figuration. Suggesting organisms in a state of perpetual transformation, at times humanoid, these forms occupy the confined space of the canvas, crossing paths, encountering one another and occasionally colliding, revealing relationships of coexistence, friction and interdependence. Colour, ever-present throughout the works, operates as both a structuring and disruptive force, contributing to the delicate balance and vitality that animate these enigmatic spaces, where nothing appears permanently fixed.

This is a lively, noisy exhibition, visually speaking. The artist has laid on a very particular feast, one marked by unabashed heterogeneity. José Loureiro’s works, both paintings and drawings, are often deliberately discordant: styles, textures, abstract and figurative motifs coexist, intermingle or collide. They pull in different directions. Combining geometry with expressive gesture, Loureiro moves between the smooth and the unruly, from neatly combed stripes to loose, unrestrained brushwork.

Tribuno is a composite assemblage. An impeccable, shimmering striped surface is slashed with vivid brushstrokes and fitted with an open mouth, like that of the Rolling Stones, red nostrils and two scribbled ears. The painting becomes a face. It speaks, shouts, rumbles — in short, it expresses itself. The oratorical title Tribuno underscores the exuberant expressiveness of Loureiro’s art, in which heterogeneity becomes a language that gives words free rein and finds its coherence in a pervasive sense of absurdity.

The Commensals does indeed push variety to the point of cacophony. But this is a banquet, after all. Everyone wants to take part, to be seen and appreciated for what they are. The exhibition’s title also names a series of curious paintings endowed with little toothy mouths, distorted, fleshy, more or less delineated. The mouth, at once an organ of nourishment and communication, is the exhibition’s most insistent motif, and one perfectly suited to the theme of commensality. Strangely, however, these mouths are paired with polychrome tubular forms that seem to disintegrate at their oral extremities, or with long, hastily brushed sticks: knives, forks, fingers, perhaps even pens; it is hard to say. The shadows they cast across the surface anchor them in the reality of a table that is also a painting.

The Commensals highlight this particular form of conviviality that revolves around the table, which brings people together. The table makes the commensal. And the painting, of course, is itself a kind of table. Although the exhibition takes the form of a convivial gathering, as many artists of Loureiro’s generation explored in the 1990s, this is not what concerns him here. His subject is the painting itself, and painting as such, as it has been since the 1990s, when he adopted the language of minimalist geometry, working with the grid through playful, rhythmic variations. The grid is still there, but now it roams freely, mingling with other elements.

By insisting on the table, the object at the heart of social life, a figure of beginnings, a surface from which anything might emerge, Loureiro remains faithful to modernism, even if only to shake it up. Indeed, he transforms the tabula rasa into a welcoming, uninhibited table d’hôte.

Let us go back a few years, to 2017, when a series of strange figures emerged that would transform Loureiro’s work: the Mites (les Acariens), precursors to the Commensals. Initially unsettled by these somewhat monstrous creatures, both in appearance and appetite, he eventually embraced the parasite. Two large paintings thus depict a teeming network of shapeless yet geometric mites (Espeleólogos). Real mites are, as we know, our everyday commensals: they live alongside us, feeding on human or animal secretions. The artist is drawn to this microscopic creature for its various qualities: an insatiable speleologist of surfaces, this invisible invader forms part of an organic continuity of life. It is a counterpart to the painter, who tirelessly tills and works the surface, while the hybrid mite embodies a voracious hospitality, capable of absorbing every artistic style, much like Loureiro himself.

Heterogeneity, then, proves essential: it is the inner dynamic of an omnivorous painting that feeds on everything — on reality as well as on itself — regenerating by devouring itself, like a cellular organism. It releases an energy that sweeps contradictions aside and shatters any sense of formal unity in favour of a “naive strangeness, unintended and unconscious.” [1] In this sense, Loureiro uses the monster’s formal disparity as a means of expressing otherness, reminding us that there can be no true commensality, and no true hospitality, without the presence of the other.

Anne Bonnin

Art critic & curator

You wouldn’t think it, but batteries are growing weaker and weaker, and increasingly difficult to replace. Everything is moving ahead at great speed, though no one really knows where to—perhaps toward paradise.

The commensals, for instance, have stopped sitting around the table, or even along one side of it, or at its head, packed together like sardines in a tin: pulling out a chair, edging it back in, and shifting it around until one finds the optimal position from which to reach the plate—a human achievement comparable to the Moon landing—has become an obsolete practice. Nowadays, dinner guests leap onto the table with the dexterity and voracity of locusts and, wherever they land, cling to it like suction cups, naked, bottoms in the air to mark their territory: they are what remains to be painted, after hundreds of years of meticulously laid tables serving as the subject of paintings. Therefore:

Chipped teacups and saucers overflowing with olive pits, out.

Gravy boats, out.

Plates: they must all be stacked up and hurled, in a single throw, against the wall; if one remains intact, leave it where it is until some absent-minded person steps on it and breaks it.

Tall tiered cakes, round and high as tyres, with candles stuck into them and slowly melting, waiting for the fool whose birthday it is to fill his lungs enough to blow them out, out.

Bananas, out.

Pots, jugs, tureens, sinister pewter candlesticks, out.

Fine white porcelain edged with cobalt blue, out.

Pears and apples, out.

Likewise, a carefully aligned trio of yellow lemons, out.

Likewise, likewise, a solitary citron shedding its splendid peel in the languorous pose of an odalisque, out.

Cutlery gleaming with multicoloured metallic reflections, out.

I paint what I see, and what I see is what lies right under my nose—just behind Agamemnon’s death mask—even if it is sometimes difficult to put into words exactly what that is.

José Loureiro

[1]   Charles Baudelaire, Curiosités esthétiques, L’Exposition universelle de 1855, Paris, Michel Lévy frères, 1868-1870.