“DO SAGRADO E DO PROFANO”
Brasília, June 19 to July 31, 2021
An exhibition by Fernando Mota for Karla Osorio Gallery
With Alex Cerveny, Ana Mazzei, Elle de Bernardini, Moisés Patrício, Paulo Lobo, Regina Silveira, Renato Rios, Rodrigo Garcia Dutra, Selva de Carvalho, Verena Smit, and Zé Carlos Garcia
“At many moments, the old and the new, pain and pleasure, fear and joy appeared prodigiously intermingled. As soon as I was in heaven as in hell, and often both at the same time.”
Herman Hesse – Steppenwolf

[INTRODUCTION]
The exhibition “Of the Sacred and the Profane” proposes the analysis, discussion, and reinterpretation of both concepts and their interpretations, which are initially seen as opposites. Through the juxtaposition and ambiguity found in both visual and theoretical elements in the artists’ works, the exhibition aims to provoke doubt and strangeness by questioning the pre-established territories of the sacred and the secular, as well as suggesting a possible intermediary, mutable, (extra)ordinary terrain.
The invited artists Alex Cerveny, Ana Mazzei, Elle de Bernardini, Moisés Patrício, Paulo Lobo, Regina Silveira, Renato Rios, Rodrigo Garcia Dutra, Selva de Carvalho, Verena Smit, and Zé Carlos Garcia present works developed in multiple languages, media, and formats, in which the divine and the mundane constantly intersect through specific terms and gestures, particular iconographies, universal symbolism, and bodily expressions. These are characteristics that involve everything from each artist’s plastic creation, through the performance of some, to the active participation of the public itself. What for some concerns the sacred, for others may belong to the profane field. And still, for others, it remains on the threshold between both definitions. The exhibition’s setup also seeks to highlight this conflict and broaden the scope of meanings of the works, exploring the richness and potential of each from new perspectives.
I chose to tell “Of the Sacred and the Profane” through the exhibition design, dividing it into three parts and tying a curatorial narrative through the intersection of signs throughout the path between the works, while analyzing the artists’ research in parallel. I firmly encourage you not to fail to include certain doses of your own sacred and also to question our profane.
For me, Art is the place where the sacred and the profane converge most sharply, as I experience it not only in the daily craft but also see it as a philosophy of life – and why not, as a kind of religion.

[PART 1]
The first part of the exhibition is exclusively composed of dark works, pieces in different shades of black in various media, distributed throughout the main hall and an adjacent room. The lighting is low, using only focal points of light on the works and abolishing the general lighting of the gallery, with the aim of adding a dramatic factor and flirting with the theater universe through a more scenographic setup. Thus, we enter the exhibition through darkness, like a narrative that begins at the origin, in a more mysterious environment where the only signs of light point to works that allude to the beginnings of different civilizations, like a story told through prophecies, myths, and legends.
In this immense black hall, we have a syncretism of cultures that together directly dialogue with each other through shared or opposing signs and references. We start with “Mea Culpa” by Regina Silveira, a symbolic work by the artist that opens the exhibition not only in the exhibition context but also positioned at the entrance, referring to the critical moment that contemporary society currently lives due to a global pandemic: a white porcelain sink covered with numerous black handprints on overglaze. In addition to the obvious comment on hygiene and health inserted precisely and unavoidably, there is the contrast of clean and dirty, light and dark, surface and content, and still, the traces we leave as a species over time, without specific memory of who, when, or how. The allusion to water also serves as the initiation element in the exhibition’s trajectory, like a baptism, and in anticipation, it functions as a place coveted by all in search of purification and absolution.
Next, Zé Carlos Garcia presents “Monstra,” an immense sculpture of cotton canvas and wood covered with black feathers, practically unrecognizable and at the same time fascinating and intimidating – we do not know for sure where it came from or even what the natural form of this eccentric animal is, its tail raised like an arrow towards the heavens, wings and torso supported on the ground, and in the center a massive sphere that could be either an eye or an egg, where we see ourselves reflected on the smooth surface as if in a gypsy fortune-telling ball. On either side are two works that subvert the forms of the monster: “Tauromaquias” by Renato Rios is a small diptych in which the entirely black surfaces of the canvases have illuminated circles in the center of each (crystal balls? eyes?), where we need to approach to observe oil reproductions of scenes of Hispanic bullfights taken by the artist from an old series of engravings by the master Goya. Bulls are sacred animals and symbols of strength, power, and resistance in many cultures, however, here we see them tiny within these circular spaces acting as part of a traditional profane ritual. On the other side of Monstra is “Buenas Noches,” a large vertical black fabric embroidered by hand by Alex Cerveny, in which we see in gold yellow the map of Latin America with its river basins, names of some of the main cities of the region, and simple drawings of the human body ascending in certain places – like a combination of geography and iconography woven in a native, ancestral language. The contours of the map resemble the silhouette of the inverted Monstra, in a questioning relation of representation of the figure – after all, who “are” the monsters?
Still in the same space, we see the painting “Amarração”