José Montealegre tells tales of weaponry unable to strike and maps caught between biased states. In his second solo exhibition at Galerie Thomas Schulte Berlin, “Drastic Measures”, the apparatus of power has been copied until the force has gone out of it; its remnants lie scattered across the gallery's three rooms.

A full set of armor, hammered from plates of sheet copper, rests on a low plinth, arms at its sides, the points of its feet curling upward, its seams secured by colorful heart-shaped padlocks. At the far end of a hallway, a headless torso of thin sheet steel tips back on its plinth as if to raise a flute– a spiked mace in disguise. Opposite, a column of slender clay-and-wire skeletons processes along a clear plinth set close to the floor, as if dancing to the silenced melody of the anonymous piper. On the surrounding walls hang sharp rectangles of unglazed stone, set among delicate flower-cuttings in copper and tin; elsewhere, drawings so faint they seem to have sunk into the glass that suspends them; and in the third room of this triangle, a series of mosaic-like fields appears to register the forces held in the very glass from which they are made.

Between these demonstrations of force, manifested in the treatment of raw material, stand the "weapons" themselves, set down like recovered evidence. A whip like a nine-tailed fox, its colored ribbons hung with trinkets from a leather grip, and a second mace–a wooden handle and a miniature globe pierced by rusted crucifixion nails, joined by a silver chain. The exhibition reads as an aftermath, its objects stripped of violence and left as outlines in a paradoxical hierarchy of erection.

Born in Tegucigalpa, Honduras in 1992 and based in Berlin, Montealegre works through what might be called retranslation: a sustained process of facsimile and transfer in which historical material like techniques of craftsmanship, botanical manuscripts or architecture is reproduced until something in the original gives way, forcing its inherent power dynamics out of balance. His subject, then, is not the sources themselves but their afterlife–the authenticity of knowledge after reproduction, and the biased versions it produces.

The failure of neutrality in Montealegre's material is most evident in his use of tiles. The fragments assembled in the Shatterfields Series were salvaged from the floor of his first solo exhibition at the gallery, “Narrativas Circulares", 2023, where a tiled ground, laid down to be walked across, registered the passage of visitors before being lifted, broken, and carried into the present show. Echoing the ceramic floors once laid in the colonial institutions of Central America–imported from Spanish factories–their unglazed, shattered state is the residue of his method. Montealegre inhabits the machinery of retranslation from the inside until it comes apart in his hands. And yet these fragments are neither Spanish nor retrieved from any postcolonial site in Central America. They were made the same way elsewhere, and exported mid-production in their anonymous, unglazed form. The colonial relic is a fiction. With it, Montealegre adds a further step to his retranslation through a turn toward invention that has been spreading across his whole body of work. "Drastic Measures" turns the same operation onto the instruments of force, retranslating those shattered floors into a map of residue.

Across the exhibition, these maps recur in shapeshifting states. A pseudo-biographical map of the artist's body appears in the armor sets Desterrado, 2024 and Melody Chain, 2026, which read as one-to-one renderings of an occupant who has since left them. Desterrado translating to “exiled”, rests riveted shut and fastened with small heart-shaped padlocks, as though what held the shell together were the diary it had become. The recumbent posture is reminiscent of a funerary effigy, albeit one that commemorates no one, having no one inside; the flute raised across the hallway recalls the Pied Piper and his tale of music leading the young away, except that here the pipe has been silenced and the player beheaded, whereas the seduction is kept, its consequence withheld.

His Clipped in the wrong season appends page numbers to its subtitles, e.g página 00/23, 2026, so that each cutting in copper, tin, and oil points back not to a living specimen but to its entry in a colonial encyclopedia. By titling the flowers for their pages, Montealegre maps the plant onto the document that displaced it, a document itself a translation of a translation, surviving only as copies of originals long gone.

The faint pigment drawings in Deposit drawing #1, Frog-mouth-helm tight rope, and Trapped Sun, all 2026, work the same seam, their dotted figures were drawn from the war manual Bellifortis and set adrift among invented motifs. They are produced by the spolvero technique, defined in fresco practice as the transfer of a design by pouncing powdered pigment through a pricked cartoon, afterwards secured between two panels of glass and edged with molten tin.

Break Lattices, 2025–26 form a series of twelve panels, each a uniform thirty by twenty centimetres of glass scored and broken into fine rectangular fields, a coordinate system laid out with nothing yet plotted upon it. A break, here, may be defined as a deliberate separation–the fault imposed from outside and halted just short of ruin, as when the glass of the Break Lattices is scored and snapped, leaving occasional fine cracks where the inner forces of the material resisted. This careful reading of the tension inside the glass, bending a fragile material to the artist's will, recalls the limewood carving of fifteenth-century Europe in a kinship not of final form but of method, through the projection of an image by working with, and against, the inherent forces of the material.

A shatter, by contrast, follows the material's own internal weaknesses, as the tiles do when dropped. Between the two lies much of the show's emotional range: force applied, and collapse from within. Sheet metal too thin to turn a blow, a procession of clay a knock would end, drawings of powdered pigment sealed between glass and soldered with tin not for finish but for survival, since to break the seal would be to let the image lift away as dust. Through retranslation, destruction, and reassembly, these power dynamics become the show's true subject. But if a map may conventionally be defined as an instrument of mastery, enforcing a means of fixing terrain so that it can be governed and taken, then what the show advances might be termed a counter-cartography–a mapping that registers not the reach of power but its exhaustion.

“Drastic Measures” is on view until 20th of June 2026 at Galerie Thomas Schulte Berlin. Furthermore “Vivero Enredado (Chimera)”  an ongoing exploration of his Páginas series is on view at Art Basel 2026 as part of Art Basel Parcours from 18th to 21st of June 2026.

José Montealegre – "Drastic Measures"

Galerie Thomas Schulte Berlin

(1. May – 20. June 2026)