The set of drawings that integrates the exhibition João Mendes Ribeiro: twenty two drawings covers a wide time frame, with the first drawings, dating back from 1983, made in the Portuguese Architecture History classes, in the early years when João Mendes Ribeiro was still an Architecture student in the Porto Fine Arts School. The most recent ones are from 2010 and 2011, referring to works built in Coimbra. The set comprehends two different kinds of drawing: observation drawings of cities and buildings and project sketches. The observation drawings are, naturally, the older ones. The latest, and also the more specific ones, are the project sketches. Despite the specific nature of each one of them, they all incorporate one same way of thinking through drawing. Following a clear and coherent path, the drawing first made with observation as a tool for thinking, slowly gives place to a more concrete and literal one, made with thinking as a tool for building.

Showing this set of drawings in a large room in the Colégio das Artes, the former Coimbra University Hospital building, introduced the scale confrontation from where the exhibition project was thought. The gap between the delicate dimension of the drawings, by one hand, and the big void of the former hospital room, by the other hand, led to the attempt of creating space inside space. An exhibit structure resulted from this exercise, girdling the big scale and bringing it closer to the observer. This clean and light structure suspends the twenty two drawings in a circular space, enclosed by a white curtain, invoking the memory of the former hospital in both functional and visual terms: the curtain, once used to divide the large ward in smaller, more intimate spaces, is visually supplemented by an approach to the aseptic, white and metallic aesthetic universe of medicine.