"Emotional Rescue" is the theme of a residence of artist Olivier Nottellet on the island of São Miguel, Azores, for three weeks in April 2019. Even though he lived in the Azores Archipelago during his childhood, this exhibition is his first intervention in Portugal. Accustomed to developing mural paintings of monumental dimensions, here the artist wanted to return to his work of drawing and painting on paper to offer a set of simple images and signs, with poetic ambitions, and a great economy of means.

As usual, the artist begins the stories without ever truly crystallizing them into a precise narrative. Things circulate among themselves, they dialogue, they question each other while responding to each other. The painting space confronts with the drawing space and vice versa. The signs, the parcels of the images come to nest, or to lean on a coloured, painted plot that seems to hold them. An absurd language emerges from the set, with an apparent sweetness that the sharpest, chiselled accents come to disturb. Incomplete images, suspended from the crossed eyes that the visitor is invited to multiply without end.