Exhibition All rivers are the same river by Clara de Cápua. Mjólkurbúðin gallery, Akureyri, Iceland, 2025

In Portuguese, the word nós carries the dual meanings of both "knots" and "us." Similarly, enrosco can refer to tangled fishing lines or ropes, but also to emotionally intricate situations, what in English might be freely translated as “knotted up” or “feeling tangled.”

The series Nós (2022–2025) is a collection of paintings depicting the dysfunctional knots Clara de Cápua created and manipulated in her studio, an imperfect mimicry of the fisherman’s knots her father used to tie during her childhood. In speaking about the process behind the series, she describes these knots as entanglements where “no beginning or end can be seen.” More than a gesture of emotional retrieval, her works unveil an inner state shaped by loss, and the memory of a father in constant reinvention.

In dialogue with that memory, Clara speaks in the first person, intimately, about the us that binds her to her father. But the absence and the effort to fill that void also resonate in us, the viewers. After all, we are all both a product and a continuation of those who came before, of those who surround us today, and a link in a chain projected into time. Death, mourning, and memory run through every life, so that Clara’s personal story reaches a universal dimension, echoing in all of us who witness her narrative.

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In the installation 29 Old Photographs (2025), we see the bow of a boat navigating, perhaps on one of the rivers of her childhood, or one of the rivers traveled by her parents, which she now inhabits through the preservation and reinvention of memory. All rivers are the same river. In the work Phantom (print with photograph, 2024), Clara returns to this image, this time assuming the point of view of the original photographer. Is she recreating the experience and gaze of her younger self, or symbolically taking the helm once held by her father?

The story Clara tells us in this exhibition is one of affection, dialogue, and growth, not a farewell, as it might first seem. Unlike the fading portrait of her father in All Rivers Are the Same River (2020), or the childhood landscapes dissolving in the successive impressions on fabric in Book to Disappear (2022), the memory of her father remains vivid through the visual accounts Clara shares. And it is through these narratives that she

connects with him, through a story where no beginning or end can be seen.

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Isabel Roth

Curator

1. Father, 2020.
Erased graphite on paper, 56 x 42 cm.

2. Book to disappear (polyptych), 2022.

Photographic print on linen, 25 x 40 cm each. Edition: 1/5 + 1 PA

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3. Seven studies on absence (series), 2020.

Intervention on photographic reproduction, variable dimensions.

4. Entanglement, 2025.

Acrylic on canvas, 65 x 85 cm.

5. Knot/Us #7 (series: Knots/Us), 2025.
Acrylic on canvas, 25 x 25 cm.

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6. Knot/Us #6 (series: Knots/Us), 2025.

Acrylic on canvas, 25 x 25 cm.

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​7. Knot/Us #5 (series: Knots/Us), 2025.

Acrylic on canvas, 25 x 25 cm.

Exhibition All rivers are the same river, at Mjólkurbúðin gallery, Akureyri, Iceland, 2025.