Unknownezqui

Unknownezqui—the professional alias of Rúben Barros —is a compelling voice within post-digital practice. As an emerging creative who explores photography and digital art, his work inhabits the threshold between captured reality and abstract re-imagination. His images transform familiar fragments of the everyday into visual fields charged with memory, emotion, and quiet critique. Through a highly personal aesthetic language, Barros invites viewers into spaces where perception dissolves and reassembles, demanding an interpretive engagement that is both intimate and open-ended, grounding his art in the lived tension between what we see and what we sense.

Technique and Methodology

Barros’s methodology begins with the world as he encounters it—his own photographs serve as the raw material from which his works emerge. From these initial observations, he constructs what might be called digital sculptures: layered textures, calibrated distortions, and chromatic shifts that stretch the boundaries of what a photographic substrate can become. By incorporating hand-drawn elements he develops a hybrid visual language in which the digital and the tactile coexist. His practice is nomadic by nature, powered by a camera and a laptop, his work is shaped continuously by the environments he moves through.

Selected Works

Fundiu - Blended

Fundiu explores the self as a perpetual observer. Barros places himself within the unnoticed architecture of daily life—such as the vents of a small electric box in Covilhã—mostly hidden, yet acutely attentive. The protagonist embodies his way of engaging with the world: quietly observing while blending into overlooked spaces. The work unfolds a delicate tension between observer and observed, inviting viewers to reflect on their own reactions when confronted with an unexpected gaze. Fundiu becomes both a study of perception and a meditation on the interplay between seeing and being seen.

Qual o caminho - What is the Path

Qual o caminho functions as a visual meditation on uncertainty. It visualises the familiar doubts that accompany moments of transition: Where do I go? What choices do I make? What lies ahead? The work situates the viewer within that tension. Two parallel hallways stand in for the branching paths a life can take. Despite their divergence, they draw toward the same endpoint, suggesting that, regardless of our choices, we are often — inevitably — carried toward the same destination.

– – = +

Issues that are often softened, sugar-coated, or dismissed are brought to the surface with unflinching directness. Barros critiques Portugal’s cultural erosion, housing crisis, and failed policies.The piece invokes Malmerda — literally Mal and Merda, “Bad – Shit” — as a blunt diagnosis, paired with the demand MAIS CULTURA, MENOS POLÍCIA (“More culture, less police”). The work is confrontational, urgent, and deeply rooted in lived reality.

4D AI PSD GRID EXPERIMENT

Deliberately created entirely within the digital realm, Unknownezqui imagines what it might mean to live fully inside a digital space, beyond the flat interfaces we normally encounter. The work reflects on the growing synthesis between humans and technology, using walls, openings, and pathways as metaphors for choice and interaction. Barros suggests that we do more than navigate these digital spaces—we inhabit them. Our presence becomes part of the architecture itself, blurring the line between creator, user, and environment, and inviting the viewer to experience the digital as a lived, spatial reality.

Ideias Ambíguas, Sentidos Opostos - Ambiguous Ideas, Opposing Directions

Ideias Ambíguas, Sentidos Opostos addresses the global fragmentation of contemporary society. Differences of opinion, perspective, and identity are what make individuals unique, giving society its richness and diversity. Yet in today’s world, these same differences are increasingly volatile, often becoming points of rupture rather than connection. Barros advocates for a posture of mutual absorption—for learning from otherness rather than recoiling from it—because without this exchange, we risk becoming trapped within our own minds. The central figures—a saint and a friend—rendered in opposing colors, embody this dynamic interplay between divergence and connection.

Escolhas - Choices

In Escolhas, choices are imagined as transitional doorways, each opening onto its own emotional or experiential terrain. They embody movement—the quiet momentum that carries us from one moment to the next, shaping who we become as we cross each threshold. Some doors lead to something as simple as meeting a friend; others open onto decisions that alter the course of a life. Together, they trace the unfolding path of lived experience.

Splited

The Splited series is a study of shadow as substance. Made entirely from photographs of shadows—a long-standing fascination for Barros—the work treats them not as absences but as complete, solid forms. Shadows become quiet representations of everything that surrounds us, shifting and reshaping themselves according to the position of the viewer. In this way, perspective becomes the true medium: meaning is not fixed, but continually altered by where we stand and how we choose to look.