DEUS VULT

A heart-shaped form in floral damask brocade, pierced by rusted rhinestone-headed nails and surrounded by toy water guns. The words — God wills it — are embroidered directly onto the surface.

The sacred heart as weapon. Faith as justification. An object that sits within a broader practice examining how authoritarian regimes weaponise culture — the ornamental surface concealing, and eventually revealing, the violence beneath.

Nuno Reis is a Portuguese artist based in London whose practice moves between object-making, installation, and archival research. Working with materials that carry the residue of social existence — worn fabric, found objects, craft traditions — he examines how suppressed histories survive in the bodies and spaces that were never meant to speak.

His work takes the Estado Novo regime as a persistent point of return: not as historical subject but as a structure of feeling still active in the present. He is drawn to the mechanisms by which power makes itself invisible — through ornament, spectacle, and the aestheticisation of everyday life — and to the traces left by those who moved through such structures while carrying something that could not be shown. Materials are chosen for their cultural specificity and their capacity to hold contradiction: the decorative and the violent, the normative and the suppressed, the exterior that performs and the interior that persists.

Nuno explores making as a form of knowing. Embodied practice, reaches places that other forms of knowing cannot access — allowing it to become a space of inquiry as much as production. His practice is also a pedagogic proposition, shaped by a belief that objects think, that making carries theory, and that the act of bringing together objects that operate at different historical and conceptual registers is itself a mode of research.