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.

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