In “The Wolf and the Feast”, the image presents itself through an unstable relation
between protection, dependency, submission, and domestication, without allowing these
conditions to ever settle into a single meaning. Rather than presenting violence as
spectacle or a narrative climax, the painting sustains a quieter and more unresolved
tension, where intimacy itself becomes inseparable from control.
The figures appear caught in a threshold between recognition and dissolution, as if image
is incapable of fully stabilizing the relations it presents. This instability becomes essential
to the work itself, the painting does not attempt to clarify the scene, but instead preserves
its contradictions, allowing tenderness and predation, care and subjugation, to remain
intertwined within the same visual field. In this sense, the image operates less as
representation than as a condition of suspension, where meaning emerges through
ambiguity and proximity rather than through resolution.
The painting resists closure or moral resolution, allowing ambiguity to remain active within
the image. The leash, the feeding bodies, never fully align into a fixed narrative, but
continue to shift between familiarity and estrangement. Through this instability, the work
transforms the figurative image into a space of tension where attraction and discomfort
coexist, and where the painting itself becomes capable of sustaining the unresolved nature
of the relationships it portrays.
Tomás Toste (Açores, Portugal 1994) is a visual artist who lives and works between Lisbon
and Caldas da Rainha. Holds a degree in Fine Arts and Multimedia, as well as master’s
degrees in Design and Advertising from IADE and a second one in Fine Arts from
ESAD.CR. Alongside his artistic research, he works professionally as an Art Director in the
field of advertising, maintaining a parallel practice that navigates between visual
communication and contemporary painting.
Throughout his artistic trajectory, he has participated in several group exhibitions, notably
as part of the collective GRAVE 4 (2025) and the IV and V editions of Coletivo Corrente de
Ar (2024 and 2025). In the same period, he was included in the finalists’ exhibition of the
Bienal de Cerveira, selected as a finalist for the Mostra Nacional de Jovens Criadores, and
exhibited in other spaces such as Galeria São Mamede. In 2026, he was awarded the
Prémio Nova Vaga ’26, the José Mendonça Prize and won the Prospettive Prize at
Cremona Art Fair. At the same year began representation by Braço Perna 44. His work is
also featured in the collections of Angelo Di Bartolomeo, Paulo Amaro, Barza, Naranjas
con Arte, and Joaquim Ferro.
The artistic practice as a whole tends to develop around the figure and the image as
sensitive, unstable, and permeable phenomena, exploring the notion of pendency as a
condition of suspension, imbalance, and potential transformation. Through processes
rooted in gesture, accumulation, and erasure, the paintings approach the image as
something continuously oscillating between appearance and disappearance. In this sense,
the work resonates with the phenomenological understanding of a perception where the
visible is never fully presented but always emerging through the unstable relation between
body, gaze, and the world that surrounds it. The figurative image is therefore understood
not as a stable representation, but as an event in constant negotiation with matter, time,
and perception.
The surface of the painting becomes a space where forms hesitate between presence and
disappearance, retaining traces of gesture, erasure, and sedimentation. The paintings
engage with ideas proposed by Jean-Luc Nancy and Georges Bataille, feeding image to
exceed pure visibility and open itself to interruption, excess, and vulnerability. Painting
becomes less a space of affirmation than one of continual becoming, where the figurative
remains suspended between recognition and collapse, permanence and disappearance.