A Serene Look upon the World

Participating artists: Lucas Arruda, Chiara Camoni, Kelton Campos Fausto, Bendt Eyckermans, Coco Fusco, Josi, Patricia Leite, Scott Lyall, Anna Livia Monahan, Shota Nakamura, Paulo Nazareth, Pedro Neves, Antonio Obá,Vera Pagava, Rosana Paulino, Solange Pessoa, Marcos Siqueira, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Hiroshi Sugimoto,Lee Ufan, Sally von Rosen, and Marie Zolamian.

Something in the breeze and the silence precedes the raging storm, a silent lesson about the fine line between permanence and transformation. In this gap, between the unknown of what lies ahead and what insists on remaining still, certain artistic gestures take shape, offering the senses the possibility of a pause before the vertigo.

Over time, the concept of the sublime as an aesthetic category has been rigorously examined by various thinkers. Their formulations seek to account for how we feel in the face of phenomena that transcend our understanding, casting us into the paradox of fascination and awe. In one of the earliest treatises on the subject, Longinus, referring to rhetoric and literature, describes the sublime as a way of reconfiguring our moral perception. Centuries later, Kant argues that the sublime does not reside in the object but in the human spirit, which, when confronted with its own physical smallness before the world, affirms its rational superiority.

A Serene Look upon the World addresses these tensions through artistic gestures that comfort and unsettle in equal measure. A human impulse drives us to organize thought through principles that offer some stability to our understanding of everyday life. We also tend to break down and rationalize the processes that guide artistic creation, as if to demystify them. Yet even armed with a theoretical and historical repertoire, the viewer is not immune to unease when faced with works that evoke mystery.

still waters run deep
– Latin proverb

A turbulent horizon unfolds in Lucas Arruda’s painting. Still in the distance, the storm, rendered in fine, continuous brushstrokes, takes shape as a fragment of memory, forming an image that seeks to capture the scale of this natural phenomenon within the realm of the psyche. In contrast stands a depiction of the Woodland Chapel, captured through the lens of Hiroshi Sugimoto. The visual economy of the photograph draws a parallel to Arruda’spatient and meticulous gesture. The way Sugimoto understands light through a large-format camera and adjusts the shutter to “capture infinity” evokes the lightness and timelessness of the Brazilian painter. Vera Pagava’s abstraction moves in a similar direction: taking the Paris sky and the light streaming through her window as a reference, the painter reduces the world to planes where time stands still. In this movement, immersion in the psychic realms of each artist presents itself as a path to spiritual elevation.

Amid this dialogue, Lee Ufan’s work comes into view: a monolith resting on a solid iron plate – the encounter between the irregular geometry of raw material and the ideal geometry that emerges from industrialization. The arrangement of the works naturally invites us to engage in a prolonged, introspective act of looking. In Mask, by Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, this same encounter is condensed to miniature scale: leaves from various trees – including camboatá, avocado, and quarubá–partially covered with gold and silver leaf, so that the extracted and refined mineral returns to direct contact with the plant. The brilliance of these materials and the perfect geometry upon the dark surface of the dried leaves both enchant and unsettle perception, creating a new interpretation of organic residue. Whether we face a natural phenomenon, an industrial intervention, or a ritualistic object from some vanished era remains uncertain.

While in Steegmann Mangrané’s work gold still retains the intensity of a manual gesture, in Scott Lyall’s it dissolves through advanced technological processes. By dispensing with the direct mediation of a defined image, Lyall’s work – created using UV-cured inkjet printing on glass, mirror, acrylic gel, and gold nanoparticles – materializes as monochromes of infinite depth. Facing his work, the gaze rests while remaining restless, stimulated by the countless possibilities of what may be revealed in the artist’s magnetic abstraction. If in Lyall’s work contemplation lingers on what remains unrevealed, in Coco Fusco’s other particles assert themselves more directly, in the phrase outlined against the sky – “Only in darkness can you see the stars.” In their ephemeral materiality, the words dissolve in the wind. Yet precisely by transcending form so subtly, the message becomes enduring.

From another sculptural perspective, Sally von Rosen’s hybrid and twisted figures carry mystery within them. These amorphous beings do not reveal themselves completely, leaving room for the imagination. Their forms – which may evoke the limbs of human bodies or other animals, legs, arms, claws, and joints – strike a balance between liveliness and morbidity, creating a spatiality that invites the viewer to move through the installation, to observe themselves through the strangeness of the other, and to formulate new questions in the face of the enigma.

and one day, far away, you will return to me.
and in the maternal flowerbed of my breast you will sleep peacefully.
– Cora Coralina

The exhibition operates as a natural system in which the unique atmospheres of each artist are exposed and mutually influence one another, forming an open and constantly expanding ecosystem. In this porous environment, the viewer also projects themselves, even if on the margins of their own expectations. The relationship established is neither appropriation nor reverence: a synergy made possible only because we ourselves are part of the natural matrix that art seeks to represent.

In this amalgam, where we are all intertwined within the same ecological structure, we are constantly shaped by the sense of wonder of artistic projection and the unique creative force of each gesture. Contributing to this chain, Antonio Obá’s painting stages an expansive light, conceived within his particular narrative, something that resonates in Patricia Leite’s twilight visions and, conversely, in the absence of clarity that permeates Josi’s Breu Imaginoso series. Between what radiates and what is concealed, a primordial dimension takes shape in which the gaze learns to adjust to existential variations.

Chiara Camoni’s works operate in a realm where sculptural practice merges with ritual gesture. Her ceramic figures, adorned with flowers, plant ash, earth, and sand, evoke ancestral deities from a pantheon that predates the very notion of art. The sublime in Camoni is not the Kantian vertigo before the immeasurable but the contemplation of a form that holds, within its very body, the passage of the seasons. In Marcos Siqueira’s painting, the same terrain reveals itself by another path. The artist transforms the walk into a method: on his daily forays along the trails of Serra do Cipó, he gathers the pigments that will shape his palette, recording, with rare sensitivity, the subjective reveries and everyday episodes of his community. The echo of these two works finds strong resonance in Solange Pessoa. In her paintings made with earth, we witness beings without a defined form, in motion, floating like vital principles. Kelton Campos Fausto draws on the same elements found in Pessoa and Siqueira, and in his paintings hybrid figures emerge from the canvas itself – figures that seem to be born from the ground or dissolve into it, in a transition between presence and disappearance that sets the material in tension with the history inscribed in these bodies.

Profound spiritual, biological, and social questions radiate through Rosana Paulino’s work, embodied in the force of the female figure. The title of the work Comigo ninguém pode (from the Senhoras das plantas series) borrows the name of a plant traditionally cultivated in Brazilian terreiros and homes – a symbol of protection and resistance, whose very popular name serves as a warning. In the drawing, the Black figure, sketched in watercolor and loose lines, appears in symbiosis with the earth: roots sprouting from her feet, leaves crowning her head, a twig between her teeth.

This theme takes on more subtle contours in the landscapes of Pedro Neves, Marie Zolamian, and Shota Nakamura. In all three, landscape painting rejects what has historically conferred authority upon it – the horizon, the distance, the vanishing point – and chooses instead to plunge us into a landscape that vibrates less as nature seen through the eyes of biology than as an atmosphere – enveloping, imprecise, almost dreamlike. In this refusal, each of the three finds, in their own way, points of contact with the founding mystery of landscape painting: not the faithful representation of the world but the insistence on making visible what, in nature, remains unspeakable.

Where these landscapes let the inexpressible linger as atmosphere, in Bendt
Eyckermans and Anna Livia Taborda Monahan it becomes scene: the dream seeps into the surface of the world, and mystery ceases to be a mood and becomes narrative. In The Carrier, Bendt Eyckermans paints a man carrying a dark sculpture down the cobblestone street of a nocturnal city, a bust torn from time, anchored by human arms, like a body that weighs out of place. The setting is everyday, all facade and parked car and numbered door, but the theatrical light and the silent gravity of the gesture shift the scene to another plane: that of ritual, of somnambulism, of the moment when something that cannot be named crosses ordinary life. Anna Livia Taborda Monahan operates in the opposite vein: the dreamlike is already the essential condition of the world. Her compositions feature landscapes charged with energy, hybrid creatures, and unusual situations: a terrain where the strange is not the exception but the lens through which nature reveals itself in all its complexity. Between Eyckermans and Anna Livia, a zone emerges in which surrealism presents itself as a way of saying that reality, if looked at closely, is already permeated by that which eludes reason.

Up to this point, the serene look upon the world has presented itself through atmosphere, matter in transformation, indescribable figures, dreams, and imagination. In Paulo Nazareth’s work, it finds its most direct expression. A photograph shows two Indigenous boys. One of them holds a cardboard sign with a handwritten phrase: MONEY RUNS OUT. The image carries the immediate force of a document, yet operates on two simultaneous levels: indictment and, at the same time, a poetic and shrewd aphorism, a statement that both observes and prophesies the end of a system. At first glance, the work seems to contradict
everything the exhibition proposes. But it is precisely in the boy’s gaze and in the steadfastness with which he holds the sign that the truest serene look upon the world resides, and therefore upon all of us.