Galeria Madragoa is delighted to present Benny Blown Away (2025), a new body of work by Luís Lázaro Matos specially conceived for Frieze London 2025.

The project draws its initial inspiration from the true story of Benny the Beluga, a solitary whale who famously appeared in the Thames in 2018, far from his Arctic origins. Benny lingered in London’s waters for several months, capturing public imagination before quietly disappearing—his final destination still unknown. This strange and slightly melancholic episode serves as the backdrop for Matos’s newest installation.

In Benny Blown Away, Matos transports his beluga beyond the murky riverbanks of London. reappears in sunlit, Mediterranean-inspired surroundings, a world of stylised leisure and warmth that echoes through much of Matos’s practice. The belugas depicted in the pastel drawings are no longer misplaced marine mammals, but charismatic, anthropomorphic characters at ease in their new climate. They smoke, chat, listen to music, inhabiting a world of leisurely rituals and soft hedonism, somewhere between daydream and performance. Originally displaced by the brutal realities of climate change, these animals are reimagined by the artist within the stylised ease of dolce far niente, in a gentle, ironic reflection on media- oriented society and ecological crisis. Their soft, languid outlines seem almost to melt into their surroundings, as if ease itself had a shape—figures of comfort whose seductive presence quietly exposes the contradictions of a world that turns crisis into spectacle.

Matos’s longstanding fascination with architecture and the body quietly informs the visual language of these drawings. The belugas’ contours echo the kind of fluid, sensual lines found both in human anatomy and in certain strains of modern architecture. The figures are drawn with a softness that suggests volume and movement—soft lines, decadent silhouettes, ornamentation that moves with the body. Matos draws upon a lineage of artists and architects for whom the curve was never merely decorative, but a conduit for feeling: desire, pleasure, and physicality. In Benny Blown Away, this connection plays out subtly; the belugas become forms in motion—bodily, playful, and full of intention.

Executed in pastel the drawings will be framed—though not in the traditional sense. On-site at Frieze, Matos will extend the world of Benny Blown Away into a hand-drawn mural, where the belugas and their sprouts will theatrically frame the drawings. It’s an ironic framing device that both elevates and gently mocks the idea of ‘the frame’ itself.

The title, Benny Blown Away, is equally multifaceted. It speaks to a gust of wind, to wonder and astonishment, and to other more intimate, suggestive meanings. Matos, known for his queer visual vocabulary, toys with ambiguity. Was Benny blown into London—or out of it? Is the beluga a metaphor, a mirror, or merely a guest on holiday?

The real Benny remains a mystery—his appearance a gentle interruption in the everyday, his disappearance a reminder of how easily moments dissolve into myth. In these drawings, his spirit lingers: leisurely, elusive, and touched with quiet extravagance.