Spanish artist Oriol Vilanova has spent two decades gathering postcards, and his exhibition at Galeria Luisa Strina in São Paulo turns that habit into the subject of the show itself. Titled “Não há só uma maneira” — “There is no single way” — the presentation opened on 1 October and runs through 14 November at the gallery on Rua Padre João Manuel.

Vilanova is the artist who transformed the Spanish Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale into a kiosk, covering its walls with 50,000 postcards from his archive, grouped by theme and colour, under the title “Los restos” (“The remains”). The São Paulo show offers a chapter of the same collection, this time devoted to cacti: black-and-white and colour specimens, fat and flattened, spiny and bald, standing alone or in groups among rocks and desert landscapes. Opposite hangs “Al descubierto” (“Uncovered”, 2026), four photographs of the cabinets that house the archive.

The second room contains no artworks at all, only emotions committed to paper and voice. In “Dear” (2017–ongoing), 31 handwritten letters from collectors to their art collections are hung on the walls, making something deeply private public. The exercise is playful rather than scholarly, treating the relationship between a collector and a collection as a romance.

That romance is performed every Saturday in “Palabras prestadas” (“Borrowed Words”, 2016–ongoing), in which a collector visits the gallery to recite a love poem to art written by Vilanova, including the line “I love you because I want to survive”. The point of the show, the artist suggests, is to restore feeling to an act usually seen as cold and self-interested: the purchase and ownership of a work of art.