Not too far from this day, and not far from where we are now, a whale washed ashore—immense and silent, as if the sea had offered it to humankind as a gift. In no time, people began arriving from all directions, drawn by that rare and never-before-seen phenomenon. The air around it felt suspended, as if time itself had paused for a moment to witness it.
“A Whale of a Time,” as an idiomatic expression, conjures images of joy and intense fun. Yet behind this apparent brightness lies the weight of our times—a world teetering on the brink of collapse. Abel Mota presents us with a fictional beach setting, where the idyllic landscape is transformed into a stage for new performances. This is not, however, an obvious celebration of leisure or the lightness of summer. The unrestrained amusement implied by the English expression in the title is paired here with an underlying irony. The individual narrative woven through the paintings becomes a space where bodies and creatures dissolve into one another, where skin serves both as disguise and as character. In this new beachside bestiary, the figures entice us with the same duality as mythical beings: at once innocent, and on the verge of devouring us.
