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"This exhibition is grounded on a longtime romance: that of visual art's affair with literature. It is an affair with many symptoms, first and foremost those detected in art production itself. Many artists have referred to literary strategies, sources, models and formats, and several literary motifs reappear in their works. Countless themes and sub-themes may be identified and several have oriented the selection criteria an the installation itself of the works in "Romance [a novel]: the use of writing, fiction, history, narrative, translation; the elements of the text, the fragment, the novel, the poem, the short story, the dictionary, the Bible; the plays between writing and literary genres, between history and fiction, between personal and political accounts, between thruth and representation, between philosophy and religion, between the signified and the signifier; the contextual backdrop and the literary setting against wich all is played out; at last, the character, the author, the writer, and the auteur."

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"Around the Corner has different meanings: here and there, everywhere, in the surrounding area. I chose the title for its sense of proximity and expectation - that something is present but out of sight; not hidden, but edited out in our hurried daily life. Most of our days are spent in routine activities and repeated acts: going shopping, eating, looking, carrying, listening, playing or talking. So much so that much of the time we are hardly aware of what we are doing. Every morning you walk the same street to buy the newspaper, probably barely registering the boys playing in the road, the man working in his garden, the dog that won't stop barking, the passer by who walks in front of us carrying his shopping."

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"The restless, ingenious Susana Mendes Silva has worked across many media, settling on none. She has made disturbing fused objects (a golden tampon in the shape of a bullet, a bar of soap implanted with a razorblade); she has done a witty and anxious private performance-on-demand ("Artphone: +351 91 7218012: Don't be afraid to ask anything you always wanted to know about contemporary art", she said on a flyer, and I assume the offer still stands); and she has taken disembodied photographs of her feet, with the camera taking a vagina's-eye-view down between the legs, as if both of these body parts somehow have minds and lives of their own. These images are characteristically cute and also rather lonely: the body is a delightful and perplexing encumbrance, a whole other country that never appears whole."

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"The 'TAG' painting series, started in 2000, refers to the 'graffitis' that 'Taggers' make and that invaded a large number of cities and its surroundings. Though in most cases those popular murals are undifferentiated and polluting one should recognize that amongst them there are works of true creativity."

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The problems of the relation between the painted image and the act of painting, the relation of the painting to space, and the question of space as the chief vehicle of meaning: these are the key thematic elements of Biberstein's oeuvre from the very beginning of his career. In the Seventies and the Eighties, he devoted himself to an analytic, primarily conceptual investigation into the painterly vocabulary, creating severely reduced, perhaps even minimalistic studies analyzing the links between the individual components of colour, surface, line, structure, and space, and the relations between the painting and the object. For a relatively long period, he attempted to create and formulate, through the isolation of individual pictorial elements, what he himself termed a kind of "semiotics of the painting through the painting". Towards the end of the Eighties, though, a radical shift occurred in Biberstein's work. He began to produce monumental, richly painted landscape compositions, inspired by radical High Baroque and drawing widely on his knowledge of the history of art, reinforced by his studies in art history at Swarthmore College in Philadelphia. The sudden turn to landscape - a genre which, as he certainly knew, seemed to have been thoroughly exploited in all its possibilities - might well appear paradoxical, considering his previous artwork. In actuality, though, it is through this very theme that Biberstein treats questions very similar to those of his earlier paintings, i.e., the problem of space. And the underlying differentiation is to be found merely in how the meaning of space is conceived. Biberstein suddenly went beyond the relatively small-scale spatial format of his earlier, analytically focused compositions, and almost instantaneously made his exit from the voluntary confinement of the minimalistic investigation of isolated elements. In its place, there appears an opulent richness in rendering an expansive, atmospheric space, one possible to interpret as the image of the ever-transient universe. Increasingly, more attention is directed towards the endless space above the landscape, to the infinitely shifting flows of wind, cloud, fog and light. And yet, still present in these renditions of imaginary scenery is the rational aspect of conceptual thought, if on the surface cloaked in an imaginative indefinability that in time comes to assume an almost transcendental character."

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"'Behind the black wood / I burn this fire of my soul'. These are lines by Thomas Bernhard. It is not very difficult to find the 'black wood' in the darkness of the painting. Nor is the second line by this Austrian author very far from the interiority of the painting: that darkness that is undone into blackness, whilst allowing itself to be populated by the fire of painting itself."