Poetry is the founding principle of the world Ángela Jiménez Durán assembles in The Word for World is Poem, where linen paintings, papier mâché sculptures and a spiral of clay share two floors of a gallery in Porto.
In Ursula K. Le Guin's novel The Word for World is Forest, an alien language uses one word for both world and forest. Ángela Jiménez Durán keeps the grammar and changes the noun. The Word for World is Poem, A Palavra para Mundo é Poema in Portuguese, is her first solo exhibition at Lehmann, and it runs until 7 November 2026. Born in Madrid in 1996, she lives in Paris and works at POUSH in Aubervilliers. Across painting, sculpture and installation, the show extends her ongoing inquiry into the four elements, material transformation and geological fiction.
Filipa da Rocha Nunes, who wrote the exhibition text, includes a poem for the artist in which water falls from the sky, slides down an embankment and gushes up from the centre of the earth to hear her song. She also reads the show as a three-leaf screen holding three figures: the word, the world and the poem. Open, it hands over its images one at a time, like cards from a tarot deck. Folded, its panels meeting, it delivers a single line: “A word is a world, is a poem, and is a world once again.”
The works give that line a body. Four sculptures are made of kraft paper, wood, papier mâché, fabric, plaster and paraffin, three of them with wax as well. Three paintings set Japanese ash-based ink and acrylic on natural linen, with sentences crossing the cloth. These seven share the ground floor, and all are dated 2026 except The Era of Temperature, a painting from 2025. Below, A spiral is a spiral is a spiral takes the lower floor to itself, an installation of clay, water, glue, fabric, wood, metal and thermal blankets.
The text reads the exhibition in three acts: first, a world brought in by loved ones, ancestors called up for the occasion; then words worked into the linen canvases, a watery landscape with its own choreography; last, an inner world rising from the lower floor. Water has a part of its own. The text ranks it as the oldest way to travel and to communicate, and song is what language becomes once water gets into it, which is why singing can wet the mouth and speaking with feeling can bring on tears.
Balzac is among the entities present, by way of the artist's direct reference to the bronze of the writer that Rodin was commissioned to make, put on view in a public space in Paris in 1939. He thought of water as a direct route to nostalgia, which mountains and green landscape resolve instead; perhaps, the text suggests, he is curious about the new clay.
From Natália Correia comes the idea that poetry is to be eaten, advice for those short of dreams, a food that enters through the ears and eyes rather than the mouth. The text ends at the entrance, with a sculpture Filipa da Rocha Nunes calls an “ear of the universe”, in a gallery where visitors listen and the works, still developing, listen back. Her poem for the artist had already set the terms: few things move more than handing the world the poem that keeps it going.
