Manuel Caldeira: Egyptian Reggae

Balcony Gallery and artist Manuel Caldeira are pleased to invite you to visit Egyptian Reggae, his first solo exhibition at the gallery, opening on February 12, Thursday, at 10 pm.

EGYPTIAN REGGAE

They say that before birds were actually birds, they were signs.
They didn’t have feathers or names yet, just these shifting bodies made of clay, smoke, and sound. In the ancient world, back when the gods spoke in rhythms and riddles, people didn’t just look at the sky as a view, they read it as a script.

In ornithomancy – the art of deciphering the future through flight, landings, and the sudden hush of birds – nothing was literal. It wasn’t about the bird itself, but the gap between one wingbeat and the next. The sudden turn, the hesitation. The omen lived in the suspended gesture.

These ceramics are born of that very interval.

There’s a story that in Egypt, in temples buried under the sand, there were these small ritual objects made of mud: strange little hybrids of instruments, idols, and toys. Some looked like beaks, others hinted at a torso or a folded wing, but they weren’t trying to look like “real” animals. They were used by priest-listeners, who would lay them out on the ground after watching the sky. The way the objects landed would echo the flight they’d just seen. The clay became a memory of the air.

They weren’t static. They’d tap them together to make a dry, jagged beat – a kind of raw, syncopated reggae made of pauses and loops. They believed this rhythm helped them translate the god’s message, pulling the future into a danceable tempo – making it bearable.

The pieces in this show seem to have inherited that DNA. They aren’t birds, but
they carry the idea of the bird as a vehicle: something that moves between worlds. The ceramic surfaces hold traces of contact, as if handled in ceremonies lost to time. Some appear on the verge of tipping, others in perfect equilibrium – all of them suspended between a sign and a secret.

Egyptian Reggae is a kind of invented archaeology. It’s a version of the past where “knowing” the future wasn’t about being precise, but about following the drift; where you didn’t predict the future, you felt it in your body through rhythm. Here, the clay doesn’t freeze a shape – it listens to it. And that which does not fly, nonetheless, heralds.

Text by Manuel Caldeira

MANUEL CALDEIRA | BIO
Manuel Caldeira (Oeiras, 1979) lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal.
Manuel Caldeira’s practice integrates the categories of drawing, painting and sculpture, investigating the tensions (and extensions) between objects, the body, and the images generated by their encounters. Working around the notions of fragility, impermanence, materiality and the idea of symbol, his works often emerges as either minimal or baroque, and often both. Formal references vary widely, from literature to the primitive arts, from modernism to archeology, theatre or music.
The following exhibitions can be highlighted: Miragem (Appleton Square, Lisbon, 2024), Orelha Quebrada (Rui Freire Fine Art, Lisbon, 2025), Album de Família (Fundação Carmona e Costa, Lisboa, 2024), Celsius & Fahrenheit (Kubik Gallery, Porto, 2020), Si Sol Flat (Ar.Co-Centro de Arte e Comunicação Visual, Lisbon, 2019), Red as Scarlet White as Snow (Giefarte, Lisbon, 2019), Vapor 2 (Rockaway Beach, New York, 2018), Spettacolo (Galeria João Esteves de Oliveira, Lisbon, 2017).
Manuel was one of the finalists for the EDP Novos Artistas Prize 2015 and FLAD Drawing Award 2023

ABOUT BALCONY – CONTEMPORARY ART GALLERY:
Balcony Contemporary Art Gallery appeared in 2017, adding one more reference to the art map of Lisbon. Located in Alvalade, in an old store in the Edifício América, it was transformed into an exhibition space with an area of over 220m2 with two floors, allowing the creation of different circuits and exhibition spaces. The gallery’s activity focus on representation of artist, in Portugal and abroad. The progressive participation in national and international fairs and the creation of exhibition projects in and out of doors, has been boosting the growth of its artists, supporting and presenting consecutive interdisciplinary projects.

Represented artists: Carolina Serrano | Dealmeida Esilva | Hugo Brazão | Laura Caetano | Mané Pacheco | Nikolai Nekh | Nuno Nunes-Ferreira | Pedro Henriques | Pedro O Novo | Sara & André | Tiago Alexandre