Affirmation Room – curated by Germano Dushá

Affirmation Room brings together a constellation of artists whose practices channel intangible phenomena. The exhibition departs from the notion of cataphasis, a term derived from Greek meaning the use of affirmative sentences to approach or describe a topic or object. Cataphatic theology, thus, applies understanding and description of the divine with positive statements. Beyond a specific theological category, this term is taken here to refer to any act of affirming the spiritual or metaphysical through positive construction. Across different languages and temporalities, the works assembled engage transcendence through geometry, gesture, materiality, and energetic composition. What emerges is a multidimensional field where form becomes a vessel for projection and meaning.

The exhibition gathers modernist abstraction and contemporary experimentation, establishing a dialogue spanning Brazilian Neo-Concretism and international artists who work with conduits for invisible forces and non-material resonance. In the late 1950s, the Neo-Concrete movement emerged in Brazil as a response to the rationalism and objectivity of Concretism, embracing a more experiential, sensorial, and poetic relationship to form. Rejecting the idea of the artwork as a self-contained, purely geometric object, Neo-Concrete artists emphasized subjectivity, and the viewer’s active participation. Their works were propositions: vehicles for sensation and emotion. Foundational figures Amilcar de Castro, Lygia Pape, and Sergio Camargo appear in the exhibition alongside Rubem Valentim, whose emblematic signs synthesize geometric abstraction with Afro-Brazilian symbolism. Pape, Camargo, and de Castro’s industrial, idealistic sculptures – dynamically evoking squares, circles, and triangles – propose structures of order and perception that connect with Valentim’s Emblemas (emblems), in which the same shapes ascend from a circuit, or mechanism, from which forces flow. If Neo-Concrete artists affirmed the immaterial experience through embodied encounter, Valentim’s project enacted a parallel but distinct mode of positive construction through the transmutation of inner matrices into form; in his 1976 manifesto, he stated, “creating my symbol signs, I try to transform into visual language the enchanted, magical, probably mystical world that continuously flows within me.”

This assembly extends into the twenty-first century with works by Adriano Amaral, Laís Amaral, Lucas Arruda, Torkwase Dyson, Advânio Lessa, Wen Liu, Paulo Nazareth, Guan Xiao, and Leah Ke Yi Zheng. Their works draw from different contexts to explore how the unseen, the ineffable, or the extra-physical might be given matter and shape. They are not inert: they pulse and emanate, inhabiting the threshold between what is felt and what cannot be named. As a polyphonic space of symbolic possibility, the exhibition congregates multiple visions, materialities, techniques, and formal solutions. Oil paint, bronze, acrylic, fabric, natural fiber, animal residue, religious icons, and technological debris coalesce into diverse systems of signification and material languages. In this sense, the show recalls the spirit of heterodox ritual sites, where icons of different natures coexist without hierarchy. From sacred reflections to abstract exercises, from Afro diasporic cosmologies to geometric patterns, from organic transformation to speculative futurism, Affirmation Room’s artists share an investment in form as a carrier of energy, vibration, and presence. The works do not depict the ethereal so much as embody it, giving contour to forces that exceed the physical dimension, functioning as instruments of mediation between different worlds. The gallery thus becomes a resonance chamber, a conceptual space for attunement and invocation, a room of affirmations.

– Germano Dushá