Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: Theodore Ereira-Guyer belongs to that rare category of artists who refuse to make things easy for you. Born in London in 1990, trained at Byam Shaw, Central Saint Martins, and the Royal College of Art, this Anglo-Portuguese creator has built a practice that defies convenient classification. Neither painter nor sculptor, nor engraver in the classical sense, Ereira-Guyer works in the interstices. His work, present in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, the British Museum, Tate, and the Yale Center for British Art, summons literary and historical ghosts that haunt our relationship with the object, beauty, and death.
Ereira-Guyer’s technical process involves a calculated mistreatment of materials. The artist paints steel plates with varnishes, then wipes them with a mop dipped in acid, lets them rust, and covers them with inks. These nascent images are then pressed into fresh plaster poured over fiberglass mesh. Plate and plaster rest together all night, bleeding each other, before being separated. By embedding the pigment in the plaster, the technique borrows from fresco. Memory becomes architecture.
This controlled violence evokes the universe of Joris-Karl Huysmans, whose novel À rebours (1884) remains the breviary of decadence, the literary and artistic movement that preceded Symbolism. Huysmans stages Des Esseintes, a misanthropic aesthete who withdraws from the world to devote himself to the cult of artifice [1]. The episode of the tortoise illustrates this quest for beauty pushed to self-destruction. Des Esseintes, dissatisfied with the shades of a Persian carpet, has the shell of a living tortoise inlaid with precious stones. The animal, unable to bear the dazzling luxury, quickly dies under its deadly adornment. This parable resonates with Ereira-Guyer’s work. His steel plates, attacked by acid, also undergo destructive ornamentation. Corrosion beautifies by destroying, reveals by erasing. The oxidized surfaces bear the marks of their manufacture, just as the tortoise bore the deadly weight of its embellishment.
Decadentism celebrates the artificial over the natural. Des Esseintes proclaims that nature has had its day. This philosophy finds an echo in Ereira-Guyer’s method. His forests, his deserts are never faithful reproductions. They are memorial overlays where a Brazilian botanical garden merges with a London park. The artist explains: “There are moments of speed and slow time linked in each work” [2]. This coexistence recalls Huysmans’ dialectic between sensory exaltation and patient construction of an artificial universe. Like Des Esseintes orchestrating his liqueurs into gustatory symphonies, Ereira-Guyer orchestrates his toxic materials, acid, rust, and plaster, into complex sensory compositions. Huysmans eventually returns to Paris on medical orders, recognizing the impossibility of his quest. This dimension of programmed failure also runs through Ereira-Guyer’s work. His plates, once printed, cannot be corrected. The turtle dies, Des Esseintes returns to the city, the plates degrade: everywhere, decadent beauty carries within it the seeds of its own end.
Ancient history informs his visual themes. The exhibition Sleeping Lions presented portraits engraved in plaster, inspired by ancient death masks. Familiar but elusive figures evoke the fate of Antinous, young lover of Emperor Hadrian. Around 130 AD, Antinous, about twenty years old, drowns in the Nile during a trip to Egypt. The circumstances remain mysterious: accident, suicide, ritual sacrifice? Hadrian, devastated, orders his deification. Statues proliferate throughout the empire, bearing the image of the young man: athletic physiognomy, falling curls, and tilted face [3]. These representations multiply then, over time, are obliterated, mutilated. The surviving faces fade under acid rain, losing their features. Who are they? Collective memory has dissolved.
This dialectic between multiplication of images and their dissolution nourishes Ereira-Guyer’s work. His portraits carry this double temporality: exhumed from an immemorial past like the busts of Antinous found at Villa Hadriana, but also contemporary, still damp with plaster. The artist plays on this ambiguity. The essential features remain, but identity evaporates in the transfer. Ereira-Guyer states: “I want to create works of which I am not totally conscious. Which avoid their own submission” [2]. This will to obscurity echoes the mystery surrounding Antinous’ death. No one knows what happened that night in October 130. Ancient sources offer contradictory versions. This narrative opacity also characterizes Ereira-Guyer’s works: they present themselves but refuse unequivocal explanation.
The fountain of Sleeping Lions reinforces this link with water cults. A basin displayed portraits from which water flowed through the eyes or mouth, evoking tears or song. The artist explains: “There is a silence in the noise of flowing water, a timeless silence of fountains, rivers.” This meditation on water as a vector of memory echoes the cult of Antinous-Osiris. After his drowning, Antinous was assimilated to Osiris, the Egyptian god himself cast into the Nile. Egyptians saw in the drowned of the river the servants of Osiris. Hadrian founded Antinoupolis at the site of the drowning, with temples and priests dedicated to the new god. Water becomes a place of metamorphosis: from flesh to myth, from mortal to divine. Ereira-Guyer’s fountains replay this transformation. The flowing water represents the impersonal flow of historical time that carries away all precise memory, leaving only eroded traces.
The turtles and sleeping lions surrounding the basin constitute another ancient reference. The lions, symbols of power, appear asleep in funerary statuary. These creatures embody strength at rest, power neutralized by death. Antinous is sometimes depicted as a lion, a symbol of his heroic youth during the African hunt with Hadrian. But after his death, this strength is frozen into stone images. The lions of Ereira-Guyer sleep a sleep full of ambiguity. The turtle evokes wisdom and eternity. The artist conceives these animals as timeless presences, guardians of a place that could be an oasis or a mirage. This indeterminacy reflects the status of Antinous’s images: faithful portraits or idealizations? The answers are lost in time.
The use of bronze adds an additional dimension. Ereira-Guyer created large bronze masks, some polished, others heat-treated to produce blue and green hues. Bronze, the quintessential ancient material, spans centuries. Most of Antinous’s bronzes have disappeared, melted down or destroyed. Ereira-Guyer’s bronzes show that even this metal ages and changes. Permanence is only an illusion.
This obsession with erased images is not simply nostalgia. Ereira-Guyer celebrates the darkening itself as a creative process. The loss of information between plate and plaster is at the heart of his method. Each impression enhances certain aspects while others disappear, exactly as memory selects and forgets. The artist rejects the mechanical reproducibility inherent to engraving. He creates unique works, subverting the original function of the medium. He explains: “Working in different media was a way to introduce the uncontrolled, fortuitous dialogues. Another way for the material culture of artworks to manifest their intelligence without my limited authorial judgment.” This humility toward the process, this acceptance of chance, distinguishes Ereira-Guyer from many contemporaries. There is something anti-modern in this acceptance of accident.
The titles that Ereira-Guyer gives to his works are part of this strategy of ambiguity. He constantly writes titles, waiting for the work to come to the title. For him, words have the right balance of abstraction, both separated from the world and anchored in it. The act of naming brings a dialogue between the historical and the specific. This is exactly what happened with Antinous: his name, spread throughout the empire after his deification, became both a precise identity and a mobile signifier, attached to all kinds of beliefs. The name outlives the person but distorts, becoming something else.
This tension between preservation and transformation structures Ereira-Guyer’s work. His forests and deserts bear the remnants of a bygone past. The deserts, he explains, evoke the engraving process: they were once seas, just as engraving comes from the plate. The works created without ink, where only rust acts, push this logic further. Rust, this oxidation, this sign of decay, becomes the expressive medium. What should kill the image creates it.
This paradox brings Ereira-Guyer closer to decadentism. The decadent celebrates decline, finds in ruin a superior beauty. Ereira-Guyer prefers images that bear the marks of their making, that display their wounds. This brutal honesty gives his works a considerable physical presence. They are not transparent windows but opaque, resistant objects.
Life between London and Portugal also shapes his approach. This constant movement, this impossibility of fully belonging to a place, has shaped his identity. Portugal remains a space of desire, always left, never fully inhabited. This condition of being in-between is reflected in his works which also inhabit intermediate spaces. Hadrian himself was a traveling emperor. Antinous accompanied him on these peregrinations, and it was far from Rome that their tragic story ended. The geographical wandering produces a certain type of gaze. The resulting works carry this multiplicity of perspectives.
Toxic materials add a sacrificial dimension. The studio becomes a place of calculated risk. This dimension resonates with theories of ritual sacrifice surrounding Antinous’s death. Some texts suggest that he sacrificed himself to prolong Hadrian’s life. Truth or legend, this idea that creation requires a sacrifice runs through Ereira-Guyer’s work. One does not create without destroying. One does not reveal without erasing.
This philosophy of controlled corruption places Ereira-Guyer in a particular lineage of contemporary art, one that refuses technological innocence. At a time when many favor clean and reversible processes, Ereira-Guyer maintains a dirty, toxic, and irreversible practice. This archaic materiality constitutes resistance to widespread dematerialization. In a world saturated with infinitely reproducible digital images, Ereira-Guyer produces heavy, unique, obsessive objects. Objects that occupy space, that age over time.
Facing these works, one thinks of Antinous’s posthumous fate. After the fall of Rome and the triumph of Christianity, his cult was banned, his images destroyed. For centuries, he existed only through a few obscure texts. Then, from the Renaissance onwards, statues were rediscovered. In the 19th century, portraits of Antinous were progressively identified. The forgotten young man came back to haunt European consciousness. This constant resurrection, this ability of ancient images to come back and unsettle us, permeates Ereira-Guyer’s work. His engraved faces seem exhumed from a long subterranean night. They still look at us, demanding something: memory, recognition, and perhaps simply attention.
It would be wrong to reduce this work to a game of cultural references. That would reduce to intellectual exercise what stems from an existential necessity. The artist does not cite these stories like a teacher. He inhabits them, reactivates them in the present. His corroded plates are not commentaries on decadence; they are decadent: they fall, collapse, decompose. His portraits do not depict oblivion; they fulfill it before our eyes. This difference between representing and fulfilling constitutes the heart of Ereira-Guyer’s achievement. His works do not talk about memory; they are memory being made and undone simultaneously.
Radical materiality prevents any reduction to conceptuality. Facing the works, it is first the physical presence that asserts itself. The grainy plaster, traces of rust, changing reflections on bronze, the sound of water. These sensory qualities resist discourse. This is what Huysmans sought: sensations so intense that they escape verbalization. This is also what Hadrian sought by multiplying images of Antinous: not to explain but to create a material presence that would compensate for the absence of the beloved body.
Theodore Ereira-Guyer has built a body of work that forces us to rethink our relationships with memory and loss. In an era obsessed with perfect digital preservation, with the refusal of forgetting, he reminds us that human memory operates through selection and distortion. His works show that erasure is not the enemy of memory but its condition. We only remember what we have first partially forgotten. The most powerful images are those that bear the traces of their vulnerability. Huysmans’s turtle dies beneath its jewels, Antinous dissolves into the Nile to become a god, Ereira-Guyer’s plates corrode to reveal their images. Everywhere, the same logic: creation passes through destruction, revelation through obscuring, preservation through transformation. It is this paradoxical wisdom, this acceptance of process rather than fixity, that makes Theodore Ereira-Guyer a truly necessary artist. His works solve nothing, console no one, promise no permanence. They accompany us in our own progressive erasure, with rusted elegance and quiet obstinacy that border on a miracle.
- Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against the Grain, 1884.
- Theodore Ereira-Guyer, interview, Floorrr Magazine, February 2020.
- Historia Augusta, Life of Hadrian, 4th century.
