Interview to Catarina Real (b.1992), lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal.
Lisbon-based artist Catarina Real embodies Gilles Deleuze’s idea of the writer as an “athlete of language”. A devoted basketball player, her multidisciplinary artistic practice spans chromotherapy, drawing, poetry and installation, often extending across walls, floors and even ceilings. We first met Catarina in 2023 at Residency Unlimited in New York, having a smoke in the crisp September light. Two years later, we visit her again in her studio in Lisbon. The space resembles practically a nursery room: toys, nail polish, beads and ropes scattered across the space, inviting spontaneity, playfulness and joy.
Here’s to her beautiful replies:
Lisbon-based artist Catarina Real embodies Gilles Deleuze’s idea of the writer as an “athlete of language”. A devoted basketball player, her multidisciplinary artistic practice spans chromotherapy, drawing, poetry and installation, often extending across walls, floors and even ceilings. We first met Catarina in 2023 at Residency Unlimited in New York, having a smoke in the crisp September light. Two years later, we visit her again in her studio in Lisbon. The space resembles practically a nursery room: toys, nail polish, beads and ropes scattered across the space, inviting spontaneity, playfulness and joy.
Here’s to her beautiful replies:
Hello, Catarina! Your artistic practice runs parallel to your academic research. Do these two areas complement each other? In what way?
More than complementing each other, they are one and the same. The curiosity that drives them is identical.
Sometimes the investigations take different objects as nourishment - whether books, exhibitions, café conversations - the many forms that affection can take - and sometimes they also lead to different outcomes: academic texts, books, exhibitions, interviews…
Your work expands across walls, floors, and even ceilings. What led you to evolve from drawing and painting toward installation pieces?
Without disregarding the root of your question, but linking it to my previous answer: I have never really concerned myself with the formats of the objects that emerge from a continuous process of investigation. For that reason, I do not see one as the evolution of the other, or vice versa. They occur within a continuum.
Sometimes circumstances dictate how thought must adapt - if I have more space I can respond in a more spatial way; if I only have a desk, the responses conform to that initial condition.
Your pieces are often participatory, tactile, and playful. Why do you like involving the audience directly? Could you explain the “communal” aspect of your practice?
I believe that the work I do is collective from the very starting point. Everything I have lived through, and all the people with whom I have shared those experiences - from friends and family to authors - are co-authors of whatever I am doing.
In a certain sense, I also believe that I will become a future co-author of the experiences or creations of the audience that encounters my work. In that sense, the sharing of the common - the communal aspect you refer to - happens implicitly and is not necessarily programmatic.
I believe the same happens with the playfulness that my work practices or suggests. Pleasure motivates my making, and all these co-authors have fostered my sensitive experience of the world. Speculating a little, I believe it is the channeling of this pleasure that leads me to create objects that value the space of play.
Play is one of the most effective methods of investigation. First, allowing it to happen, and second, truly engaging in it, can actually be quite demanding.
In the exhibition Highly Confusing Times (2024) you created the entire mural in a single day. Is your technique quite intuitive, or does it involve a lot of preparation? Could you guide us through the process behind your Focused Drawings, from their origin to completion?I’m always jumping between your words: intuition requires a great deal of preparation or, better said, a great deal of practice. If I have to generalize, I can say that I train consistently so that gestures or decisions can be agile and not painful.
I have always liked Deleuze’s idea of writers as great athletes of language - those who search for language within language and who, to do so, must develop the muscle of writing, just like other athletes.
In the exhibition Highly Confusing Times, I presented almost nothing very little, a schematic installation with drawings from 2016 to 2024. Each drawing belongs to a broader series exploring different modes of attention, such as “inattentive drawings,” “focused drawings,” “fun drawings,” “forms and structures,” etc.
The mural painting created in loco belongs to the series “focused drawings,” which uses external discourses to which attention is paid through listening while the drawing is being constructed. The hand acts and the perception of the discourse occur in non-coinciding fractions of time.
This particular piece was made while listening to an interview to João Fiadeiro. Because the action requires attention to an audio object of limited duration - and the duration of the audio dictates the duration of the action - there was no possibility of taking longer.
During our studio visit, you mentioned an “intimate relationship” that certain women writers have with language. Could you expand on this idea, as well as on your own relationship with writing? How is your written work connected to your visual production?
Octavio Paz said that poets have no biography, that their work is their biography. He also added that “Pessoa, who always doubted the reality of this world, would approve without hesitation that one should go directly to his poems, forgetting the incidents and accidents of his earthly existence. Nothing in his life is surprising - nothing, except his poems.” Octavio and Fernando were remarkable men.
In the case of remarkable women, it is also true that their biography is their work. But it is necessary to note that, alongside this proposition, the incidents and accidents of the existence of remarkable women constitute a different narrative step. Therefore their works are simultaneously that remarkable piece they bring into being as well as their lived lives and their concrete, verifiable steps, which define the paradigm to come.
These will justify the turn toward a generous art - not only careful, but caring - that establishes other ethics of action. It is as if the notability of the initial sentence were doubled, and the power of that notability establishes a new paradigm of what it means to be remarkable.
That Octavio and Fernando were remarkable men is unquestionable. And it is also unquestionable that it is unnecessary to register the meaning of man. If Octavio and Fernando had been remarkable women, it would have been necessary to explain, before being remarkable, what it means to be a woman.
To answer that question one could write a whole treatise, so I will respond with just a small comma. That intimate relationship - understanding language, tongues, idioms and dialects (and the small nuances between them) as one of the great systems capable of shaping human existence - happens through the experience of language in our bodies and through the transduction of that experience back into words and grammars.
And it is beautiful, and deeply moving to me, to absorb that writing as a sketch of hope.
The relationship between writing and visual production - although in my practice they sometimes meet formally, in works that might be placed in the drawer of visual poetry or even concrete poetry - occurs for me precisely at that point of paradigm shift, and in what governs creation itself.
Recently you have been interested in chromotherapy - the use of color for therapeutic purposes. Could you tell us more about this interest and what projects have emerged from it?
Color Therapy, as I have been calling it, began as a playful reaction to encounters with practices from Chinese medicine. I became fascinated by the way everything is considered relational: events or symptoms are seen as part of a system, which differs from body to body and from life experience to life experience.
A symptom is not the direct expression of a cause, but rather the expression of an imbalance within that system, and the repair is also dynamic.
The first expression of this fascination in my practice appeared with the publication The Fire in the Liver in 2022. In the final descriptive note it read:
“THE FIRE IN THE LIVER is a publication that gathers fleeting and fiery clippings and notes, moderated by a modest revision of the gallbladder, celebrating the control of the fire but not the end of the fascination with flames, tongues of fire, matches, lighters, kindling and other incendiary materials. It also celebrates the passing of three decades, on the occasion of the birthday-party-exhibition MY LEFT IS YOUR RIGHT.
*A phrase heard in distant 2017, during the reading of The Imperfect Blue. Due to an inability to coordinate while carrying a table, one of two young people succinctly solved a substantial part of the misunderstandings of the world. Bless him!”
This was also an exhibition I used as a way of repairing my relationship with the color red. Until then, I never used red (nor brown, which is another issue). Some force blocked our relationship and I could not find a place for it anywhere. For years, I even gave away all the red pencils and markers that came in sets because I never used them.
Between 2022 and the present, trying to mimic that dynamic functioning between variables, I began developing Color Therapy — using the tools and knowledge I have to think about how they could be placed at the service of others, as a way of unlocking small frictions in their systems.
It is also a response to my concern for those around me, and to the growing apprehension regarding the emotional imbalance, extreme fatigue, and disillusionment that affects them, and me.
This experimental therapy uses my observational capacity - a way of seeing that comes from the study of drawing and that I developed in my master’s dissertation under the “affect-name” of posture - along with image-composition tools, the dynamism between framing, forms, colors, and materials, and the interest I have been investing in choreographic practices and an expanded understanding of social choreography.
It takes the form of therapeutic prescriptions that are meticulously directed (in physical format, sent by mail) to each of my patients. These prescriptions attempt, in a more or less interventionist way, to act upon or influence their systems. Naturally it depends on the involvement and receptivity of the patients, but I can say that I already have several success cases.
It has been beautiful to understand more deeply that such a fundamental element of the artistic system as color lives from the inalienable relationship each of us has with it. Each relationship involves personal narratives, stories, and preferences. These relationships correlate with social functioning (the symbolic understanding of colors is not fixed, as history shows) and with language itself.
Color is, in itself, an event - or a phenomenon. It occurs as a result of the relationship between light and matter, and it claims social significance when it involves us in this constantly readjusting event.
Besides being an artist, you are also an athlete. Has your experience as a basketball player influenced your creative projects?
My personality was deeply shaped by playing basketball. I believe my family history established the characteristics of my sensitivity - coming from a large family of humble origins, mostly farmers, where play was never solitary; where ideas of property, sharing, and mutual support were shaped early; and where contact with materials, earth, plants, and animals established a tactile predisposition.
But I also believe that basketball trained this sensitivity to adapt to the inevitable collectivity of existence and to the understanding of individual limits alongside collective strength.
When I started playing, access to the sport was free, which meant that my teammates came from very different social backgrounds. It became clear that from the locker room to the court none of that mattered, and that responsibility was distributed among everyone. The famous phrase “there’s no I in team.”
But also in a flexible way: we are not always equally capable of being present or available. This made me understand that a collective does not live from an equal distribution of roles; it lives from the flexibility of giving what is possible and distributing roles according to the capacities and availability of its members.
More than anything, it made me experience friendship as something that nourishes energy and the immense happiness of belonging and being supported by a group.
There are also technical aspects connected to the observational practice that is central to my artistic creation: peripheral vision training, the understanding and rehearsal of sporting choreographies, game tactics, and their adaptability to the reaction of the opposing team.
Although the first part of my answer comes from a deeply emotional place, I believe both forms of learning express themselves in my artistic practice - sometimes more explicitly, sometimes implicitly.
You also run your own publishing project, Edições da Ruína. I’m curious to know how that experience has influenced your view of the book - often a central element in your works - as an artistic object.
Edições da Ruína is a project very dear to me, to which I dedicate a large part of my time despite it being voluntary, demanding, and unpaid work.
I have been acting as something like an editorial coordinator - selecting projects together with Gonçalo Duarte, bringing authors together with designers and other collaborators - and also as a text editor.
This latter role I have been discovering more and more, and it gives me immense pleasure. Entering other people’s texts with the intention of helping them gain a solid body, and thinking about them as a whole - as a book - has been a great learning process for my own writing practice.
Through practice I have come to understand better what it means to build a book and the different ways this object can be understood and received by readers.
In fact, we met in New York, where you were doing a residency at Residency Unlimited. It was very a happy moment :) How did that experience affect you personally and professionally as an artist?
I fell in love with New York, I can say. It is a city with impressive vigor where, in the field of artistic creation, you find your peers regardless of the niche in which you best fit.
There are many projects dedicated specifically to artists who make books - a space between literature and other artistic fields.
I was also lucky to meet people who remain very dear to me and with whom I have deepened friendships.
Professionally, I had the opportunity to show my work in several exhibitions, participate in publishing fairs, and come into contact with other ways of producing and thinking about artistic work. The richness of contact with what is different is invaluable, and although it is not explicitly clear how it has acted upon my way of working, I am certain that it had an impact.
Do you plan to continue exploring abroad? Where do you see yourself as an artist in the coming years?
In fact, this answer is intrinsically linked to the previous one: in the 2026/2027 academic year I will begin a Master’s degree in the United States, as I had the good fortune to receive a scholarship from the Carmona e Costa Foundation in partnership with Fulbright.
In addition, still in the month of March this year, I will open a solo exhibition at the Spanish gallery Ángeles Baños, with whom I am very happy to have recently begun working.
I have never been gifted with an imagination that produces very concrete images, so it is difficult to say exactly where I imagine myself in the coming years. But I can say that I take great pleasure in exploring different contexts and new places.
Cultural differences inevitably express themselves in ways of organizing and thinking, and contact with that difference continually stimulates my curiosity. I hope that the future will take me further in that direction.
Interview by Victoria Álvarez Conde. 09.03.2026
