Águas vivas

Águas Vivas is a painting by the Portuguese artist, Inês Zenha. In 2025, the painting formed one part of a triptych included in the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition, Águas Turbias (Murky Waters), at Centro de Arte Dos Mayo in Spain. The exhibition opened with a large-scale installation of a ruptured, leaking, tiled bathroom which the artist conceived as both an oratory and the source of the murky waters themselves. Beyond the installation, a network of sewage pipes took viewers into a liquid underworld. In darkened rooms, paintings and sculptures made visible a shadow reality of mud, water and bodily fluids in various states of transformation. Steering viewers beyond the gendered space of the bathroom, Zenha constructed a chthonic landscape through which to explore “the monstrous, the animal, the dark, the foreign, the feminine, and the queer,” realms typically suppressed by society. 1

Águas Vivas measures over four metres in length, and contributes to a trio of paintings whose total scope is large enough to encompass the viewer. The painting depicts two anthropomorphic figures in fluorescent green against a dark green background. The artist notes that the painting’s colour scheme is the colour of nature, but its lurid tones also evoke associations with toxicity and alien life. 2 The figures are surrounded by streams of bright blue water, which flow divergently around them. Water issues from the mouth of one of the figures, and extends from its fingertips. It appears as part of their very being. Across Zenha’s practice, liquids function as a metaphor for fluidity, a concept through which the artist seeks to counter rigid systems of categorisation. By emphasising the body’s hydraulic composition, Águas Vivas portrays fluidity as fundamental to human existence, and reinforces a dynamic integral to the queer experience, one which enables individuals to exist within and in spite of the systems which aim to contain them. In this work, and in many of the artist’s other works, the figures are depicted with their eyes closed, excluding the external world. The painting portrays the figures as grounded in their own inner being, impervious to external forces the world seeks to impose on them. Its luminosity gives prominence to an image of a joyful and liberated existence, one rooted in processes of transformation and becoming.

1 https://ca2m.org/en/exhibitions/ines-zenha-murky-waters

2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPDDcn_Xkto