Nuptias consists of photo-paintings and collages made by Rennó based on wedding photographs. The artist?s alterations are made with paint, objects, cuttings and recompositions. Besides referring to the plurality of affective unions without regard to belief, race, sexual orientation or any other convention, the artist revisits various icons of the culture of visuality, in both the Occident and the Orient. The photo-paintings and their titles make reference to the ceremonial, the pop culture, recent politics, religion and social inequality.

Nuptias consists of photo-paintings and collages made by Rennó based on wedding photographs. The artist?s alterations are made with paint, objects, cuttings and recompositions. Besides referring to the plurality of affective unions without regard to belief, race, sexual orientation or any other convention, the artist revisits various icons of the culture of visuality, in both the Occident and the Orient. The photo-paintings and their titles make reference to the ceremonial, the pop culture, recent politics, religion and social inequality.

Nuptias consists of photo-paintings and collages made by Rennó based on wedding photographs. The artist?s alterations are made with paint, objects, cuttings and recompositions. Besides referring to the plurality of affective unions without regard to belief, race, sexual orientation or any other convention, the artist revisits various icons of the culture of visuality, in both the Occident and the Orient. The photo-paintings and their titles make reference to the ceremonial, the pop culture, recent politics, religion and social inequality.

A imortalidade ao nosso alcance [Immortality within our reach] aligns with the vocation of Rosângela Rennó’s work, reflecting on the role of expanded photography in the social construction of representations and memory. In the installation, 76 products from different brands are displayed in a showcase whose sandblasted glass offers some “peeping holes” into its interior. In each transparent part of the glass a product/ face appears. Each portrait-for-sale lets out some satisfaction, a smile, a relief or a pleasure. On the outside, the key to open the window reads: Immortality within our reach. The installation was produced on the occasion of Rennó’s panoramic exhibition at Pinacoteca Station, between 2021 and 2022.

Made up of aluminum panels in different sizes, the works in the Ato Falho (2023) series organize a collection of adhesives – offering repair services for metal doors – in a grid.
According to Cidade: “These stickers have a particular history, because I collected them. I would walk through the steel doors of the city, peel off these stickers and then graffiti over the surfaces. Then, I asked myself, why not compose a work suggesting a decomposition? What I do is decompose the work done by someone out in the street who went there and pasted it. I rearrange the stickers so that they are visible, respecting a grid format. In this case, I don’t use rulers, but compose the grid with my eye, a human grid, an anthropometric grid in which there are errors, dirt, fingerprints. The measurements are not exactly perfect or symmetric. The stickers themselves, having been removed from the public space, are old, torn and overlapping. None are new.”
This procedure of gluing stickers on doors offering repairs is informal work. Usually, the service is done by kids who walk the streets in downtown São Paulo in the early mornings pasting stickers – a movement that imitates the practice of graffiti. Those who walk around the city do not necessarily notice this movement because it is mostly swallowed by the architecture. In the work, on the contrary, the stickers appear in the foreground.

“This work follows, in aesthetics and logic, the perspective of one of my first works: “Figa na fuga” (“Crossed fingers upon fleeing”), in which there is a will to understand the courage in fleeing when staying means continuing to suffer the ills of oppression. Thus, to think of fleeing as courage is to take the very word ‘flight’ as an action of rebelling, making it a concept that, in this view guided by an Afro-centered perspective of history, contradicts the hegemony that leads it to the notion of cowardice”
André Vargas

“I started ‘Manifestantes’ a week before the first march of the ‘revolución diamantina’ (a march protesting the rape of a young girl by police officers in northern Mexico City). I started thinking about a series of large-scale stitched paintings depicting women in different marches and protests around the world privileging the moment of unison protest – when their voices rise.
Sewing for me is a kind of noisy drawing. These portraits are voices.”
Tania Candiani

Edgard de Souza’s new bronze can be considered something between a self-portrait and a possible portrait of the viewer. Its shape is reminiscent of a hand mirror, whilst its surface is matte. Its shape is also related to Edgard’s renowned “Drops”, which evoke bodily fluids.
Edgard cites the mirror from references as diverse as Fritz Lang’s “Maschinenmensch” and Verner Panton’s designs. From Constantin Brancusi to the “Vacuum form” molding machine. Edgard evokes several concepts in this sculpture: craftsmanship and the industrial reproduction processes, the individual and the mass produced. His production goes through this dichotomy: his bronze pieces are meticulously hand carved in plaster before going through the reproducibility process of casting.
From early on in his production, in the late 1980s, de Souza has been investigating sculpture – its processes and histories – with the same vigor as his contemporaries were devoting to painting. His works are permanently installed at Instituto Inhotim, in Minas Gerais and served as a guiding light for the 24th Bienal de São Paulo (1998), known as the Anthopophagy Biennial, curated by Paulo Herkenhoff and Adriano Pedrosa (adjunct). Pedrosa also curated the panoramic exhibition by de Souza at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (2004).
Edgard offers a recent statement about the piece: “An important aspect for me is the shape itself. When the vanity mirror takes on the dimension of a racket it becomes a weapon – especially when it weighs 11 pounds – you can crack someone’s head! Weapons are always a problem, and the suggestion of reflection puts the spectator as part of such problem. Today’s denialism has to do with people’s desire to escape responsibilities… I know I’m conjecturing, and all of this is not necessarily explicit in the work, but it was this idea that led me here. I don’t know, maybe the idea about this piece would come full circle if the work was titled ‘Problem’.
De Souza speaks once again about duality. About the beautiful and the ugly present in each one of us. Reflection, in the history of art, has often pointed out the duality of the individual: from Caravaggio’s “Narcissus” (1597-1599) to Oscar Wilde’s novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (1890).
Reflection always offers both seduction and danger

Moscheta articulates a series of photographs of the Chilean desert superimposed by iron plates, forming volumes that recall the monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001. The symbolic presence of the black volume of undefined matter in the 1968 film, pointed to the synchronism between past and future, as a timeless annunciation of man’s pathbreaking destiny. The object’s first appearance in the film takes place when man’s ancestor discovers that the same bone that forms its structure could be used as a tool and, finally, as a weapon. In Moscheta’s works, however, this monolith is indeed subject to the passage of time and, given its ferrous material, acquires the marks of this passage with constant oxidation and corrosion. Moscheta’s monoliths thus point to the growing wear and tear of the constant quest for progress.

In his new series of concrete plate collages, Iván Argote works around the construction and formation of history and cultural narratives from the use slogans, artifacts and monuments. Instead of a story written by the “winners”, Argote presents here a collection of recomposed artifacts from an archeology that prioritizes affection and resistance.

The Cloister series appeals to a reverential fear in the face of a claustrophobic nature. At the same time that they evoke chaos, the landscapes represented have a picturesque matrix. The term picturesque appears in the 18th century to propose a new aesthetic category aimed at natural landscape. According to Argan (1909 – 1992), the picturesque is expressed in gardening as an act of educating the natural landscape – different from the sublime, which brings a sense of dread through the untouchability of the same nature. Both a terms are not only contained in the roots of Romanticism as an aesthetic movement, but also in this series. Cloister makes reference to the missionary painting of the Brazilian landscape, but uses the toxic tar to portray organic green. The use of the oil derivative behaves as an artifice so that the weight of a condition becomes much more evident than the chaos portrayed on the scene.

The power relations inherent in the materials chosen by Komatsu often constitute the real raw material used in his works. Lusco-Fusco brings together the precariousness of Drywall with the ephemeral of the news. With cuts and strokes, Komatsu breaks the surfaces of his paintings into geometric or gestural abstractions, while news fragments suggest representations of what could appear there. While his titles suggest a place between day and night, his forms suggest something between figuration and abstraction.

In Hemisférios [Hemispheres], 2014, Cadu presents 168 sheets of tracing paper bearing marks burned into their surfaces by intensified sunlight. To make this artwork, the artist developed a support on which a magnifying glass was held still above a stack of sheets of tracing paper. The rays of the sun – made more powerful by the magnifying glass – burned their path on the stack. Thus, each sheet of tracing paper symbolizes an hour of the sun’s path, and the complete set constitutes a graphic record of the passage of one week in Hornitos, both extensively and intensively, since the 24 sheets of each stack were burned in a way that is proportional to the temperature and intensity of the sun on each day.

Lia Chaia works with perceptions and everyday experiences, such as the permanent tension between the body, urban space and nature. Often humorous, her work addresses how the body reacts to the stimuli and disruptions of the contemporary world. A body that adapts to landscapes, that creates relationships with other spaces, objects and people and thus becoming a research territory.

The color of our Sun, as observed from Earth, is a fascinating interplay of light and atmosphere. Although we commonly perceive it as a warm, golden hue during sunrise and sunset, and as a brilliant white during the day, its appearance can vary due to the Earth’s atmosphere. When the Sun is near the horizon, its light must pass through a thicker layer of the atmosphere, causing the shorter blue and violet wavelengths to scatter, giving rise to the warm shades of red, orange, and yellow that we often associate with these times. In contrast, during midday when the Sun is higher in the sky, its light has to travel through a smaller thickness of the atmosphere, resulting in less scattering and a perception of white light. The color of the Sun is indeed white, representing the sum of all colors in the visible spectrum. It is a captivating reminder of the intricate relationship between light, atmosphere, and our perception of the world around us.