The Hypocriticality…
DIOGO PINTO
The eye is never passive. It is restless, always asking for more—more stimulation, more clarity, more spectacle. It yearns for intensity, for that which ignites just beyond satisfaction. Such a monstrous appetite cannot help but dictate how we relate to one another. We look in order to understand, but also to categorise, to judge, to claim. The gaze becomes a way of owning, however briefly, what is seen. It may be described as natural, even necessary—a survival instinct evolved over time—but it is also constructed and exploited, guided toward certain ends.
For nearly a decade, Mariana Tilly (b. Lisbon) has focused her work on this relentless, demanding eye—not as an organ, but as a force. Her paintings, drawings, writing, and videos trace how looking structures our world: how it organises identity, sexuality, morality, and belonging into a dense, overlapping field of images. We do not just see these images; we live through them. They inform how we present ourselves, how we read others, and how we decide who fits and who does not. This guidance is neither neutral nor accidental. The eye has long been trained by larger image-producing mechanisms—cinema, broadcast media, advertising, and national propaganda—each refining the techniques of seduction, repetition, and persuasion. Tilly’s work examines how these visual regimes calibrate desire and attention, determining not only what we see, but how and why we see it.
Within this field, the gaze carries power, and often abuse. There is the gendered gaze, which frames women’s bodies as objects to be evaluated and controlled, shaping expectations of how women should behave, work, and speak. There is the racialised gaze, which marks bodies as “other”, producing stigma before a word is spoken. These ways of seeing are so deeply embedded that they can feel invisible, even as they dictate social outcomes.
Tilly’s work approaches these dynamics with gall, leaning on theatricality, humour, and visual seduction (not to dull the edge, but to draw the viewer in). The eye, after all, must be gripped before it can be challenged, and her images tend to satisfy that initial hunger for looking before turning it back on itself: what once seemed pleasurable becomes uneasy; what once seemed obvious becomes unstable.
This instability extends beyond the figure and into the built environment. Her recent intervention in the Social Centre of Bairro 6 de Maio—redesigning the facade of the last standing structure in the demolished self-built neighbourhood on the outskirts of Lisbon—shifts the question of the gaze onto territory itself. In this context, visibility is double-edged: to be seen can mean recognition, but also targeting. Value gathers, and with it, the threat of erasure. The building stands as both a beacon and a warning—an image that asserts itself while anticipating its own disappearance. The mural, once fading and in need of care, now returns with renewed intensity; its new gradient-like arches mimic the colours of local spring and summer sundowns, lifting the structure into a rhythmic, pulsing presence that insists on its relevance even as the ground around it is cleared.
The gesture is imported into the exhibition space in Basel, where the mural design is adapted across the large window panes of KASKO’s gallery space. Transposed into a new context, it continues to operate as both surface and signal: a translation of place that cannot fully detach from the conditions that produced it. Alongside it, two paintings replicate graffiti once found in the same neighbourhood—outbursts of expression that were never meant to last, now carefully re-inscribed in oil on canvas. Another painting isolates a distorted Lisbon sewer lid, suspended in time and space, as if pried loose from the ground it once sealed. These works do not reconstruct the site; they circulate fragments of it, each carrying traces of a place shaped by pressure.
Adjacent to where 6 de Maio once stood, an intersection is quietly mediated by a recently built roundabout. A modest piece of infrastructure, designed to regulate flow, prevent collision, and keep things moving. Tilly gives voice to the winding structure in the video Rotundinha (2026), as a witness to the surrounding cycles of cons/destruction, eviction, and absence. The roundabout graduates from traffic device to a figure of the system itself. Everything passes through it, nothing remains, movement is constant, yet resolution never arrives—like a carousel that promises direction but delivers only rotation. The dizzying turning echos something larger: the circular logic of policy, the accumulation of contradictory decisions that can hold a territory together while pulling it apart (aka The Infrastructures of Endless Deferral or TIED).
Relentless Pursuit, then, assembles a portrait of a space caught in spin. A space made by shifting values, by the uneven distribution of visibility, and by the eye that both registers and reinforces these conditions. Fragments of architecture, gestures of repair, traces of language and surface orbit one another.
What emerges is a staging not meant to escape from this system in motion, but to directly confront it. We are drawn into its rotation, made to circle through these visions of a place caught mid-transition. And yet, within this circulation, something lags; the repetition begins to show its seams. We cannot escape the roundabout. The image does not resolve; it lingers, slightly off.
Because this system does not operate abstractly, it produces real consequences: displacement, erasure, the redistribution of value along familiar, unjust lines. What is seen, and how it is seen, determines what is protected and what is allowed to disappear. The roundabout is not just a metaphor—it is an infrastructure of management, a silly little technology that keeps everything in motion while preventing interruption. What Tilly reveals is how deeply the gaze is embedded in this process. It does not simply witness these transformations; it participates in them. It affirms, repeats, and normalises. It turns violence into image, and image into something consumable.
In this sense, the eye is not innocent. It fixes identities, reinforces hierarchies, produces stigma with a glance. But it is also where disruption can begin. Not by stepping outside the system (there is no outside) but by interfering with its operations. By misaligning the image, by refusing its clarity, by insisting on what does not easily resolve, Relentless Pursuit does not offer relief. It insists on proximity. It keeps us inside the loop, where looking is no longer passive, and no longer neutral. Where the act of seeing becomes a responsibility—and where even the smallest disturbance in perception can hopefully begin to unsettle the structures that depend on it.
