ERVAS DANINHAS,

With Allan Gandhi, Darks Miranda, Hiram Latorre, Juliana Cerqueira Leite, Julien Saudubray, Karola Braga, Líuba Wolf, Loren Minzú, Manuela Costa Lima, Manuella Silveira, Maria Martins, Marina Nacamuli, Martin Lanezan, Matheus Chiaratti, Niobe Xandó, Sheyla Ayo, Tiago Mestre, Tiago Yebet and Yan Copelli.

On view at Quadra gallery, 521 rua Barão de Tatui, São Paulo from February 24th to March 28th 2024

(THE POLITICS OF A BODY IN FIRE, A BODY IN FLAMES,
 A BODY ON FIRE) EXTINGUISHING THE LIGHT

darkness devours your burning body your open mouth your suicide
 of pleasure on the grass your hands gathering my face
 of leaf-stained shadows your moan in the shadow
 of floral undergarments your hair is solidly black
Open your eyes and say ah!
Roberto Piva, 1975

A carnival night: sweaty bodies, masks slipping. Beauty and ugliness, attraction and repulsion cling in a feverish embrace. In February’s streets, scents merge, beauty emerges in strangeness, in difference and daring. There are worlds beyond Apollo: enchanted, intoxicating, seductive, and dizzying.

In its essence, art is both a pagan and spiritual celebration, a moment above and beyond time – a Saturnalia, a reverie. A reprieve from the tedium of flat lives, lives without flavor or scent. Even if temporary, a single work of art can revolutionize a life, becoming permanent, marking a turning point – for both artist and viewer – puncturing the smooth surface of society. Artists navigate murky rivers beyond the surface, testing and surpassing limits, driven by a single urge from within: the intuition that awakens in the dark of the night, that sets the heart racing and leaves no room for rest.

To be an artist is to affirm daily a desire, a freedom, to question and dismantle limiting or oppressive contexts. This deliberate act of annihilation lies at the heart of Tiago Mestre’s video The Journey. In it, the artist crumpled, one by one, the business cards of a life he no longer wanted, throwing them at his cell phone screen like so many cries, creating a galaxy of possible worlds. This existential search echoes in the paintings of Julien Saudubray, who reveals fleeting images without seeking to capture them definitively, letting color and form vibrate through the dissolution and repetition of paint layers.

Creators of free enclaves where poetic fantasy flows, artists are also the world’s clinicians, measuring its pulse, diagnosing society and prescribing generous doses of wildness: barefoot walks through forest trails, herbal baths, and gatherings around the fire. This wildness—both of nature and our own—surfaces in Martin Lanezan’s Sol, in the fire, wood, and water of Loren Minzú, in Tiago Mestre’s sculptures, and in Juliana Cerqueira Leite’s earthy-body-urn, embodying her own metamorphic environment. The raw sensuality of Maria Martins’ vine silhouettes, the forest raised by Liúba Wolf, and the microcosm of healing and poison depicted by Sheyla Ayo evoke the same fertile terrain, ancestral spaces from which life generously springs, heals, and destroys.

The force of this impulse breaks the bars of the colonization of bodies, their means of expression, rest, and release. Plants grow in the white cube, limbs shake free, like on a carnival day. These micro-worlds are reflected in Niobe Xandó’s Fantastic Green Flower, oscillating between popular allegory and botanical bacchanalia. Her sinuous, cannibal plants interact with the tactile allure of Tiago Tebet’s velvety flower and the grooves left by Manuella Silveira’s layers of paint, which, as she applies or scrapes, sketch the outlines of creatures and ghostly landscapes, free from definitions. The hybrid beings sculpted by Darks Miranda and Yan Copelli also resist categorization, evoking transformations from one state to another, possibly a kind of liberation. Miranda’s Spider Egg appears ready to hatch, releasing an alien creature, while a bronze tongue flows like a river from its ceramic cradle—perhaps transforming revulsion into guiltless pleasure—in Copelli’s Big Mouth.

Like sap through plants, the energy pulsing in pedestrians’ veins winds through the city’s streets, between its towers of carrion and overpasses. Between flânerie and exploratory rays, it vibrates in the verses of its poets, stretches in empty glasses, in the crumpled sheets of lovers, and in the scents captured there. Karola Braga crystallizes the olfactory essence of a passion, while Hiram Latorre paints An Idea of Love as its staged representation. Worlds aflame also meet in Marina Nacamuli’s photographs. Street creatures, night-dwellers, party-goers, crossed paths and gazes, fleeting encounters, eternal exchanges. There is beauty in chaos, in the burning of bodies, in their curves and potential entanglements, as suggested by Allan Gandhi in his intuitive, expressive painting and by Matheus Chiaratti in his Ricardo-Lázaroinstallation. Here, the artist invokes the ghost of the gay magazine model Ricardo Villani, whose life ended abruptly after his rapid rise. Between Eros and Thanatos, sacred and profane, Chiaratti also dialogues with Manuela Costa Lima’s sculpture Free Will, which strains concepts of light and darkness, discarded and reimagined objects, transcending and filling the void between bodies and the city that surrounds them.

Between underworlds and ecstasy; play, festivity, and masquerade ball; madness, nature, and freedom, the artists gathered in Ervas Daninhas speak of pulsing blood, of the erotic, of emotions and dance. They foment insurrections and guide us through Babylon’s dark alleys, glitter-covered avenues with confetti and empty bottles, or 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, piercing and breaking the pavement of our sidewalks.