ERVAS DANINHAS - RJ

With Hiram Latorre, Loren Minzú, Manuella Silveira, Marina Nacamuli, Martin Lanezan, Matheus Chiaratti and Sheila Ayo.

On view at Quadra gallery, 175-301 rua Dias Ferreira, Leblon, Rio de Janeiro, from March 5th until April 6th 2024

Beginning of March, Rio de Janeiro simmers under the scorching sun. Summer stretches on, and the sound of carnival music and batucadas still echoes down the avenues: glitter and confetti shimmer in the sidewalk cracks. Blood pulses hot between sweaty bodies and empty cups, asphalt and hills, sand and forest, waterfalls and herbal baths. After its first chapter in São Paulo, Ervas Daninhascontinues its pagan dance, docking here to merge the fever of February with more life—art, intoxication, and vertigo. For art, like carnival, offers a moment above and beyond time, a Saturnalia, reverie, and jubilee.

Emblems of the masked carnival culture, the bate-bolas portrayed by Marina Nacamuli carry a tradition that generates wonder and amazement with the thud of their balls hitting the ground and their scary costumes. The bate-bolas lift symbols belonging to the collective unconscious and establish an irreverent bridge between past and present, rituals from the North and South. Here, art and life collide, opening a portal to plunge into a new year with a light head, free from torment.

This chaotic joy, woven with irony and interlaced symbols, lies at the core of Manuella Silveira’s paintings. Ghostly bodies, allegorical figures, and elements seemingly borrowed from the circus universe or popular culture recur in intuitive sarabands made of layers and removals of paint, creating fields of saturated matter.

The escape from reality that art and poetry provide, bubbling and pouring forth like hallucinations from a place where reason holds no sway, evokes the pleasure and uncontrollable desire of souls and bodies, which Matheus Chiaratti embodies in his installation Casa do Leonilson. In it, drawings and verses float like so many love letters that will never reach their recipient, bathed in celestial and pleasure waters, scorched by desire and fire, like the tear-stained diary of a distraught lover.

In dialogue with the longing and absence that permeate Casa do Leonilson, Hiram Latorre reveals in his painting Where I Perceive All That I Love the staging of romantic anticipation: a set table, a pitcher, and glasses waiting for a toast; red flowers rise and spill waters of desire.

Finally, turned towards the primordial pulse of nature, the works of Loren Minzú, Martin Lanezan, and Sheyla Ayo evoke wildness, the wisdom of the owl and the snake, ancestry, and the preparation of herbal potions that heal and annihilate; the power of shadow reflecting light, the dance of cosmic movements mirrored in earthly fields.

Thus, the ascent of plant sap aligns with the celestial stars, echoing the heartbeat of hearts and the energy pulsing in the veins of passersby. They snake through the city’s streets, between overpasses and towers of carrion, waves and dunes, fleeting encounters and eternal exchanges. Life and art vibrate in the verses of poets: from Roberto Piva and Antonin Artaud, stretching in the depths of empty glasses and in the crumpled sheets of lovers.

Between underworlds and ecstasy; play, festivity, and masked ball; madness, nature, and freedom, the artists gathered in Ervas Daninhas speak of blood, of the erotic, of emotions and dance. They foment insurrections and guide us through the dark alleys of Babylon, along glitter-strewn avenues with confetti and empty bottles, or through the muddy trails of the forest. They exalt the Dionysian, the disorder of the real, the disruptive and transgressive power of art, without which we suffocate; the freedom from which new atmospheres bloom. Like vines and weeds that grow, sinuously infiltrating the smooth surface of conventions, they set the stagnant waters of bourgeois life in motion, breaking the hard pavement of our sidewalks.