Martins&Montero is pleased to announce! The urgency of intimacy, an unprecedented exhibition that brings together two artists from different generations and contexts: Charbel-joseph H. Boutros (Lebanon, 1981) and Hudinilson Jr. (Brazil, 1957–2013). This is the first time that the works of these two artists are placed in dialogue, establishing a dialogue that opens new readings on portrait, self-portrait, and its aesthetic and political unfoldings. Although distant in time, space, and trajectory, both share the conviction that intimacy can be a starting point for traversing the world.

Hudinilson Jr., one of the most striking figures of his generation, worked with photocopy as if it were an extension of his own skin. By tirelessly reproducing parts of his body, distorting them, enlarging details until they became pure texture, he invented a radical exercise of self-vision in which identity dissolves in the act of seeing oneself. His body, in copy, ceased to be just body: it became a field of desire, of politics, of questioning the limits of representation. At the same time, his practice collected images and archives — from newspaper clippings to banal photographs of athletes or actors — in search of the points where male sensuality erupted in the cracks of popular culture. Hudinilson discovered sexuality and vulnerability in places where the common gaze saw only routine or entertainment, revealing the political potential of an intimacy exposed amid social conventions.

Charbel-joseph H. Boutros, a singular voice in the middle east and Europe, in turn displaces the portrait from its most immediate function. His works expand the genre into more abstract, poetic and conceptual fields, creating portraits not of faces and bodies but of layered elements. In Night Cartography for example, a brand-new bedsheet is used by the artist for one night, impregnated with his dreams. The next morning, Boutros collects that day’s newspapers, reduces them to ashes, mixes them with tap water from Paris and a binder, and immerses the fabric in this compound. The gesture transforms intimacy into matter traversed by the world: nocturnal dreams imprinted by the dust of collective events. The work is both a personal cartography and a societal portrait of historical time, simultaneously contaminated and illuminated by what surrounds us. In another work, Spring, a terracotta Jar made of 93 coils of clay — one per day, throughout the entire season — becomes the translation and receptacle of that season. From the outside, the piece is smooth, almost classical; like a funeral jar facing the collages of Hudinilson Jr., inside, it reveals its layers, as if it were possible to enter the interior of a memory. By adding invisible and unexpected materials (such as dreams, tears, fear, hopes, sweat…) to the physical body of his installations, H. Boutros opens a new territory in how art works are conceived and gives shape to unflinching portraits and the unquantifiable human quotient that lie behind what is tangibly seen. Such is clear, for example, it the piece 03 386051, a portrait of love, and death in which the artist presents his late father’s cell phone, a small object encased in his mother’s gestures of keeping that phone functional and charged for the past seven years since her husband’s passing. An installation created out of the real materials of death and love.

By placing side by side, the works of Hudinilson Jr. and Charbel-joseph H. Boutros, Martins&Montero proposes an improbable yet profoundly fertile encounter. The sensual force of Hudinilson’s body meets the poetic abstraction of Boutros, who expands the portrait into performative and conceptual gesture. If Hudinilson exposes the body as a territory of identity and revolution, H. Boutros presents dream, memory, and feeling as portraits of the invisible. In common, both point to the urgency of intimacy: not as withdrawal, but as a transformative force, capable of illuminating both the individual and the collective.

The exhibition invites the public to rethink portraiture beyond physiognomy. Here, the portrait is not just image: it is texture, archive, politics, memory, dream, and desire. It is a space of friction, in which intimacy expands and becomes an aesthetic and revolutionary experience.