The effect of the poetics gathered in the white-cube-nothingness of the São space

by Fernando Boppré

A group of artists exhibiting amidst another group of artists. Walls of an old printing press filled with works of art. Weekly meetings culminating in an exhibition called “Térrea,” featuring Amanda de Stéfani, Ana Amélia Brasileiro, Ana Blumer, Ciça Callegari, Chris Ameln, Esther Bonder, Janaína Corá, Paulo Lobo, Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa, René Cardillo, Rose Klabin, Seth Wulsin, and Valéria Oliveira Santos.
There is a certain heroism (in the sense of the insistence of passion) in the desire and resilience of these 13 artists to hold weekly meetings to discuss poetics, stimulate artistic processes, imagine an exhibition, and open it in August 2022 – inaugurating the exhibition space of Ateliê São, in Cambuci, São Paulo. Two months before the elections in which the permanence of neofascism in the Presidency of the Republic threatens the existence of beings, words, and things in Brazil, amplifying “the spectrum of lead” and “the finger of death [that] touches the most innocent and vulnerable,” using here a small excerpt from the play “Complex of Oleannas,” by Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa, the artist-curator catalyst of the meetings.
Well, let’s take advantage of this opportunity and start with “Coiso,” by Ciça Callegari. The deactivated freight elevator cabin serves as a kind of confessional. There you have to kneel in the genuflection and look at yourself in a mirror capable of producing a disturbing image: there is a bit of a diabolic being in you too. The bell installed in the confessional, one of those you hit with the palm of your hand and it goes pimmmmm, ironically confers a commercial dimension to the religion professed there, not to mention the bronze used for the casting of the Coiso mold.
On the other hand, there is also an Olympus on display. Amanda de Stéfani adopts as a starting point a packaging of an electronic appliance appropriated as a base for her model. Instead of projecting something, an image of the symbolic accumulation of contemporaneity emerges: a pile of saints and perfumes, side by side, staring at us enclosed under the acrylic. Not far from there, another base, by the same artist, exhibits dried flowers, as if stranded, it is one of the islands that in her creation map is called Florinda.
By the way, the exhibition, on the upper floor, houses a map cabinet, with other works by this group of artists. In this furniture, when you pull out the drawers – originally designed to hold maps, but appropriated by art museums and artists for archive storage – René Cardillo invents his “Map of the end of the world.” A series of boards with images of contemporary and past maps, of this planet and other celestial bodies, which are merged as when adding other colors to a can of white paint. The artist’s interference in this apocalyptic cartography guides both thought and vision through the paths of the Anthropocene, challenging thought and visuality.
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It is interesting to wander through the exhibition space of “Térrea” freely, like “the spider that weaves webs” and the “fish [that] kisses and bites what it sees,” using the suggestion of Paulo Leminski. I wandered like this and noticed the conjunction of some themes, so dear to current living: the presence of spiritualized works, of moves committed to memory and ruin, the participation of elements from companion species, and an evidently political cry for survival.

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Paulo Lobo occupies a large vertical space with a hybrid of jaguar and shark. In art theory, much has already been said about extended field sculpture; to think about Paulo’s production, it would be necessary to imagine painting in the extended space. It can interact with the wind, float like seaweed, serve as a portal. Huge masses of color and graphics stretching through space. In one of the works on display, the suggestion of bodies of companion species: “Jaguar shark.” It is also worth highlighting another work, almost an oxymoron in relation to this immense installed painting. It is a minimal presence, a vocal sculpture called “ão.” The emptiness of the inside of the mouth when pronouncing, at once, the phonemes /ã/ and /o/, becomes a sculptural object of alginate. A feast for poetry.
Animals are omnipresent in this exhibition, a connection with life (not necessarily human; and this is commendable) is opened in Seth Wulsin’s boxed audio, as if visuality were submerged in favor of the auditory. And also in Valéria Oliveira Santos’s fine porcelain work that refers to snake skin, arranged in sequence, entangled, over a lightbox. The ritual of snakes reactualized, once again inscribed in the history of art or anthropology (Aby Warburg, in analyzing the survival and repetition of the form of snakes throughout the history of humanity, did not make much distinction between what was art and what was ethnography, between Botticelli’s Venus and the ritual of the Hopi Indians), is proposed by the artist in a delicate labor.
The immanence of painting is also present in Térrea. A core of artists wields the brush on canvas and, curiously, approaches a more spiritual dimension of the work of art. Esther Bonder’s landscapes manage to capture the wisdom of plants, in a radical surrender to vegetal thought in the pictorial field. The images refer to an idyllic natural state where human presence gives way to the omnipresence of the forest, waters, and sky, evoking a contemplative stillness.
Ana Amélia Brasileiro shakes up landscapes by self-portraying amid nature, inserting human and mental elements into the composition. Amidst rocks, trees, hills, and waters, her body – and her almost always inquisitive gaze, pointed out of the canvas, towards the viewer – is the index of language, a construct that shakes and repositions existential and psychic understanding.
Janaína Corá turns the broom into a broad brush. She presents two large paintings elaborated from a historical and anthropological research that refers to the origins of clichés about witches, including the idea that they flew on brooms – images that come from the fabulous Renaissance narratives of the New American World and the misunderstanding of Europeans regarding indigenous body and way of life. One of them, belonging to the “Sweepings” series, is exhibited without a frame or frame, like skin roughly drying over our heads. What is seen are vigorous masses of red color fixed and dripped on the canvas. On the one hand, an abstract trace of patriarchal violence, and on the other, a feminine demonstration of the ability to resignify narratives and fight for survival.
Painting is also presented in the dazzling watercolors of Ana Blumer and the cezaneannas of Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa. Ana shows us watery and earthy horizons in a rare demonstration of intensity obtained from the bold use of watercolor technique. The result is transcendental and spiritualized images, with a feeling close to the sublime. Rafael, on the other hand, makes our gaze tremble in a highly sophisticated game