This is the first systematic retrospective—albeit deliberately partial—of the photographic work of Jorge Molder (Lisbon, 1947), an artist widely recognized in Portugal and with a significant international career, particularly during the 1990s and 2000s. His extensive oeuvre, spanning approximately fifty years and structured from the outset around a succession of series, some of them very large, is incompatible with a fully comprehensive retrospective.

What is proposed instead is an exhibition focused specifically on his silver salt, black-and-white work, more precisely on the period between 1991 and 2003, when the artist adopted digital technology in the production of his images. The initial chronological milestone coincides with the moment when Jorge Molder began to take his own body—often his face—persistently as the object of representation, staging in the studio a character, or multiple variations of the same character, largely abstract and inscrutable, which only superficially coincides with himself—the personification of the double. This figure is constructed (or dramatized) through pose, gesture, and expression, but also through light and shadow—pure artifice. As the artist repeatedly emphasized over the years, self-representation in these images is not synonymous with self-portraiture.

Contrasting with these, at the beginning of the exhibition, is a set of photographs made between 1981 and 1986, in which his figure eludes the objectifying gaze of the camera, yet which he curiously classified as self-portraits, alongside two series of staged portraits—of fencers in one case, and of waitstaff in the other—produced in 1986, which prefigure, albeit obliquely, his later self-representation work. Structured according to a principle of chronological sequencing of the series, the exhibition is divided, due to its scope, into two consecutive parts, each functioning as an exhibition in itself.