In this installation, Manuel Valente Alves (Abrantes, 1953) uses photographs, drawings, and paintings, made between 1990 and 2025, to develop a poetic dialogue with Petrarch's letter of the same name (Ascensus Montis Ventosi), written in 1336. The central themes addressed in this letter are transposed into a contemporary reflection on art, perception, and the act of climbing. The ascent of the mountain, in both works, is a metaphor for a journey of deepening—spiritual, in Petrarch's case; artistic and reflective, in Valente Alves. The act of walking, of climbing a mountain, the movement in space, is not only a physical and spiritual act; it is also an act of resistance to the "objectification" of human experience. In the artist's words, "this act, documented and artistically reprocessed in a slow and thoughtful manner, opposes the speed and artificiality of digital images circulating on contemporary networks. In this sense, this installation may raise questions about the boundaries between what is real and what is represented, topography and autobiography, the finite and the infinite in our way of seeing, feeling, and imagining the world." 

Artist - Manuel Valente Alves 

Curated by - Lúcia Saldanha 

The exhibition will be open to the public from October 25, 2025, to February 16, 2026.