For ARCOlisboa, NÉBOA presents a dialogue between the practices of Andrea Davila Rubio and Andrés Rodís, two young Galician artists whose works examine the surface as a site of inscription, tension and transformation. Though working through distinct formal languages, both artists approach material as something porous and unstable: a place where structures of control, memory and duration become visible.

Andrea Davila Rubio’s sculptural practice approaches the body as a territory shaped by intersecting systems of care, discipline and defence. Developed during her first year at the Institute Art Gender Nature (IAGN) at HGK–FHNW in Basel, her recent works depart from the notion of the “clean look”: the contemporary aesthetic regime of smoothness, uniformity and erased imperfection elevated by wellness and fashion cultures into a normative ideal. Davila Rubio understands this language not as neutral, but as a mechanism of regulation linked to histories of eugenics and to the internalised forms of self-surveillance that structure contemporary life, particularly for female-identifying bodies.

For ARCOlisboa, she presents Clean Look, a sculptural work in glass and aluminium in which facial form appears suspended between exposure and containment. Derived from cosmetic face-mask moulds, the piece evokes the face as a surface to be corrected, sealed and standardised rather than expressed. The industrial precision of aluminium encounters the fragility and transparency of glass, producing an object that oscillates between protection and vulnerability, cosmetic refinement and bodily alienation.

Andrés Rodís’ work unfolds through processes of translation, displacement and measure. His paintings emerge from close observation of vernacular architectures and incidental geometries encountered in everyday spaces: a raised granary marked by painted triangular forms, the diagonal joints of a terrace floor, the improvised brick ventilation patterns of an auxiliary construction. These structures become the starting point for a pictorial language built through repetition, transfer and modulation.

Triangles recur, generating rhombuses, grids and unstable spatial systems that migrate from architecture into the surface of the work. Their proportions are determined by the physical logic of the structures from which they originate — height, centre, span — before being translated onto canvas. Rodís treats painting as an accumulative and permeable field in which gestures, measurements and material traces sediment over time. Oil, enamel, wax and fragments of studio residue coexist as records of a process that remains open, susceptible to interruption and continuation.

Rather than depicting architecture, Rodís carries its measurements into the work itself. The paintings operate as structures in movement: expandable, dilated and contingent, like the joints and triangulations from which they derive. Surface becomes both support and event, holding together fragmentation, memory and duration within a continuously shifting system of relations.

Where Davila Rubio’s work presses against the body and its regimes of visibility, Rodís’ paintings absorb the spatial and material conditions surrounding them. Both practices resist immediacy and fixed legibility. Instead, they ask what a surface can contain, how form accumulates experience, and how looking might become a sustained encounter with processes that are still unfolding.