Autumn Correspondence was developed at the invitation of curators Hiuwai Chu and Raphael Fonseca to be part of the exhibition Lucid Reverie — Panorama of Portuguese Contemporary Art (2025), an initiative of the Galeria Municipal do Porto, under the direction of João Laia, which aimed to map the diversity present in contemporary artistic practices in Portugal.​​​​

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This work follows the thread initiated with the project A Leaf in Your Pocket (2022), a mural painting designed for the interior of Porto Penitentiary Institution (Custóias), Matosinhos, and starts with the same question that had already motivated the artist's edition N.O.R.W.A.Y. (2023): how to revisit an image that only exists in an inaccessible place?

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If in N.O.R.W.A.Y. the answer was to reproduce fragments of the mural painting on multiple stamps and to use the postal service trip to allow the image of the ivy to expand beyond the confined territory in which it existed, in Autumn Correspondence another problem is considered: What if the image begins to deteriorate as soon as it leaves that limited space? What if it starts losing its color, falling to the ground, decomposing, in short, imitating the natural cycle of life that usually affects these plants?

 

Using digital manipulation, the color of new photographic fragments taken from the mural painting was changed from the original green to more autumnal colors—reds, oranges, and browns. New stamps were produced but, this time, instead of being used to send a letter, they were glued in the gallery space in a composition reminiscent of a ruin, an architectural vestige absorbed by vegetation.

The installation plays with an idea of circularity, maintaining the same themes of desire and isolation that had motivated previous projects. The suggestion of expansion of the ivy materialized by the design of the stamp collage is countered by the constant reminder of the original reference from which the image comes—each stamp have the geographical coordinates of the prison, and the design on the wall actually replicates a segment of the original painting—as if all gestures of escape were useless and absurd. Despite the large scale of the installation and the exaggerated number of stamps, a materialization of the enormous desire to communicate with someone, there remains a feeling of emptiness, of absence, which is only reinforced by the prominence of the word “Vacant,” taken from a stamp used by the postal service to identify when a letter could not be delivered because the address was not occupied.