Libertines gathers together a portfolio of Machado's theatrical variations on his trademark erotic vocabulary – large, richly-worked compositions in which the artist's art deco-influenced imagination is devoted to scenes of assignation, seduction and decadent excess. Couples entwine in curtained boudoirs, on tandem bicycles against dense floral wallpapers, in claw-footed baths, and on carpeted staircases, while larger groups stage dinner-party orgies presided over by tuxedoed men and masked women amid wine bottles, oysters and sliced meats.

Machado's characteristic artistic device, the tilted, sometimes inverted picture plane, with lovers seen from above or upside-down against ornamental grounds, recurs throughout, lending even the most explicit encounters a choreographed, stage-set artificiality. Venetian masks, powdered wigs and formal evening dress place some of the participants within an eighteenth-century masquerade tradition, while others are unmistakably jazz-age, their women bobbed and stockinged, their men in braces and bow ties.

Ghostly attendant figures – pale-blue voyeurs crowding round a chaise longue – introduce a note of the uncanny into an otherwise sumptuous world.  Machado's debt to cubist simplification sits comfortably alongside a Brazilian love of pattern and ornament.