I love you till Thuesday

I love you till Thuesday: a childlike awkwardness, a slip of the tongue, the lapsus of an emotional body, or what happens when the language of love clings to the calendar as a form of modesty in the face of the infinity of feeling. I love you till Thuesday, or how not to say “forever” without frightening oneself with the possibility of an ending.

I love you till Thuesday speaks to us of what must first have been laid down, of the space that must have been made, of the relationships that must be accepted and preserved as they are, with indulgence, in all their ambivalence, before opening oneself to new possibilities of receiving. It is a collection of love letters to those who have loved us and who love us, to those we have loved and whom we love; an inventory of intimate moments that have punctuated the formation of a gaze, a serene gratitude addressed to contradictions, doubts, uncertainties, lesser feelings and great emotions, to the wounds, secrets and revelations that have passed through these relationships.

Time and alteration seep into the materials of the works; detachments create spaces for breath. What is at stake here is living with, and in the company of, these epiphanies and torments; brushing against what resists us; opening oneself to a form of tender indifference in order to make room for new aspirations. The forms Anna de Castro Barbosa offers us do not yield themselves directly. Their hermetic quality gives form to silences and voids: a kind of search for the essence of things, an eroticism of the unveiled scene, pure suggestion as though to caress what we will never grasp. Gleams and reflections inhabit the exhibition like flashes of possible revelations.

The exhibition is structured around hollow bellies and possibilities of receiving, where nothing is expected yet everything is finally available. It is concerned with forms seeking a balance between two contradictory tensions, or with how to recount cognitive dissonance, a double bind at work when several realities coexist and truth, or even a simple answer, is no longer the question. In an incessant back-and-forth, the feeling of love becomes a form of complex suspension, an eternally unresolved question lodged in the hollows of the body, with which one must learn to coexist.

I love you till Thuesday is also a reflection on the grandiose banality of the feeling of love, on that which is trivial yet becomes an entire world to us: the experience of being dazzled. It is a question of a form of ravishment, a wonder that takes me out of myself, that shifts and distorts as well. Anna de Castro Barbosa attempts, with tenderness, to introduce lightness and irony, and a certain suppleness too, into the serious and sometimes cruel realm of the romantic relationship. In dialogue with this form of insouciance, and as a mise en abyme of the double bind that inhabits the works, the artist’s practice grows denser, charged with affect until it takes on flesh where the body had, until now, remained only a suggestion.

The work takes on the weight of things until it is punctuated by a kiss: an incarnation of the gesture, the carnal mark of the threshold of a truth spoken with the tips of one’s lips, the devouring desire that preserves the object of love.

I love you till Thuesday, Anna de Castro Barbosa’s third solo exhibition, following All that you touch you change, all that you change changes you (Mexico, 2025) and Il Quiproquo (Milan, 2026), forms part of a genealogy of the exhibition-as-work, where the installation itself becomes a situated whole that produces meaning. The artist’s work thus becomes, all at once, a constellation of artefacts — solitary, associated — and a constellation of exhibitions. To write and rewrite, again and again, the same story.

Céline Poizat Sabari