Warm Sun Cold Rain

With Anderson Borba, Darks Miranda, Juan Casemiro and Theodore Ereira-Guyer

On view at ZSenne Art Lab, 2 rue Anneessens, Brussels, Belgium from September 2 to September 9th 2023

A project in collaboration between The Bridge Project and Elizabeth Xi Bauer

Walking in an unknown city. The streets are basking in a golden light under the storm clouds. The sun sets late, it´s still summer, the magic hour. It´s starting to rain. You take shelter in a nearby café, have a tea or maybe a coffee. Where are those leaves, these beans coming from? Under which sun were they left to dry? You look at the passersby through the window. The world is reflected in every raindrop, slowly sliding on the glass before disappearing. Soon the road is shining after being washed by the rainfall, which dilutes the summer dust and the layers of one´s life.

Where does one belong? The window reflects the last sunrays, it reminds you of past summers, faraway landscapes, the family garden, the voice of a dear one. The thread of the past is floating loosely around you, enveloping you in a warm mist, like the water that is now evaporating from the asphalt. Your identity dissolves and reshapes itself at every step. The sun and the rain remind you that you are safe, you belong here, you belong anywhere.

Night falls, the streets are still busy, silhouettes are like black cutouts under the artificial light of the streetlamps. People look the same, under the dark sky, the streets are full of shadows, nocturnal creatures.

This moment of suspension, this in-between time and space is at the core of Theodore Ereira-Guyer´s work. His etchings resonate as an interstice amid joy and sorrow, here and there. In his landscapes, real and imaginary territories, familiar memories and inner travels melt, conveying a feeling of melancholy. Nocturnal birds, creatures from the desert and hermit crabs abandon their usual hideouts and shelters to wander into the exhibition space, gathering under the same light. As rain falls in faraway mountains, their eyes might be watering with tears, as they feel the same sweet sadness we can experience when lost in a new place. Transmuting and transcending a cauldron of references and feelings, Ereira-Guyer acts as an alchemist that adds organic elements diverted from ancient divination manuscripts to the engraved images that he transfers onto plaster. As he stretches the limits of a rather traditional art technique, the artist merges layers of personal and collective memories, translating and transcending feelings otherwise impossible to convey.

Like Ereira-Guyer, Juan Casemiro´s works are made of tears and raindrops, by the glimpse of the stars shining in the night sky, the diffuse lights of the sun slowly warming up a window frame or the soft light of a sun setting near the ocean. As Casemiro wanders in the city, he collects found objects, silently organizing and assembling them to evoke lost moments, past conversations and recollections. Like this, umbrellas frame a plastic sheet and turn it into an expanded painting, or a white lid evokes a celestial dome, while a crying wooden piece and a soft reflecting light column float in the exhibition space. With a delicate attention, barely altering what exists under our blind eyes, Casemiro rescues elements that are about to disappear and distracts them from their original destination, giving them new identities as he travels between territories and cities, as a wanderer without attachment or identification.

Contrasting with Ereira-Guyer´s and Casemiro´s almost ethereal reading of their environment, Anderson Borba´s wooden anthropomorphic -almost totemic- sculpture gives a body to a search for one´s identity. Intuitively carving and layering colored cut-outs on the raw surface, Borba addresses his subjective experience as a migrant, recreating the idea of oneself, layered by time and moments lived far from Brazil, under the London clouds. Like a snake shedding an old skin to begin anew, Borba´s work follows an organic process. Burning, scrubbing, and pasting, he marks the matter with movement, observing the negative space that is left as he removes the wood in a reverse process - like Ereira-Guyer´s etchings - and as he adds layers, like mental maps of ideas and memories or pixels and sediments that he encrusts onto the wood. The form and an emotional intelligence of the material precedes the discourse in the artist´s work, opening the dense matter to outside sensations. Sensual and permeable, Borba´s sculptural work nonetheless evokes Brazil´s socio-political reality and carries the weight of the exploitation of natural resources, the smell of burnt forests. As he transits between the natural and the artificial, mimicking colored rocks and shells incrusted with plastic, his work might suggest a missing link between the past and the future, the here and there, a long-forgotten language.

This twilight zone, this intermediary space of longing and belonging while creating new layered identities also permeates Darks Miranda´s “Zona Abyssal” (Abyssal Area) video work. Using found footages entangled with historical video documentation and excerpts of her own performances, the artist collides recordings of the fires that devasted Brazil in the past years and older aggressions to the country´s natural resources such as the rubber fever that occurred during the 19th century.

In the opening her dystopian video, she humorously wonders if the disaster she´s about to depict was due to a falling meteorite or the fact of visitors coming from the cosmic abyss. The images that run under our eyes are dense, raw and sensual, like Borba´s sculpture: you can almost feel your lungs burning, the blade cutting the wood, the erupting lava, the elastic touch of the rubber being malaxed or the scent of exotic flowers that strive in this postwar landscape. As she dances around, wrapped in a latex suit and SM attire, wearing a breathing mask, or trying to balance a papaya on the top of her head, her neck crowned with pineapple leaves; she evokes Brazil´s colonial past and the absurd fact that we are the cause of our and nature´s sufferings. Creatures of the abyss cross the screen and an alligator emerges from its shell, eventually reminding us of a primal identity, one that is intertwined with the sun and the stars, something that will remain, long after we are gone.

Accumulating idiosyncratic references and subjective recollections, sociological and historical elements that merge with the collective imaginary, just as the sediments that compose the landscape, Anderson Borba, Darks Miranda, Juan Casemiro and Theodore Ereira-Guyer present, in Warm Sun Cold Rain, a peculiar ballet of references and identities where inner and outer territories melt and whimsical creatures dance with ghosts of the past, bridging cultures in a shapeshifting common memory. Warming up the northern hemisphere´s rainy days under the Brazilian sun, the artists question the sense of longing and belonging that permeates our times and contemporary tragedies. Transcending melancholy – and the Brazilian saudade that no other word can translate – and through an acute gaze watered with tears of sadness, joy and laughter, they remind us of these moments in-between, the void that we carry and allows the outside light to enter, as we wander, strangers under a same sun.

Theodore Ereira-Guyer (born 1990, London, UK) lives and works between London and Lisbon, Portugal.

From 2009 to 2011 Ereira-Guyer studied at Central St. Martins, London, followed by the Royal College of Art between 2012 and 2014. In 2016 Theodore began studying for his PhD in Contemporary Art at the College of Arts at the University of Coimbra, Portugal.Ereira-Guyer’s work has been exhibited internationally and is held in private and public collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK; the British Museum, London; Tate, London; MoMA, New York, USA.; Yale Center for British Art, Connecticut, USA.; the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France and the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, Portugal. In 2023, Millennium BCP Foundation, Lisbon, Portugal, and MACAM – Museu de Arte Contemporânea Armando Martins, Lisbon, both acquired works by Ereira-Guyer which are now part of their permanent collections. In 2014 Ereira-Guyer was the recipient of the Helen Chadwick Award for multidisciplinary artists. In 2019 the artist’s work was exhibited at the Palazzo Pesaro Papafava as part of the 58th Venice Biennale. 

Juan Casemiro (born 1993, Itajubá, Brazil) lives and works between Conceição das Pedras, Minas Gerais, and São Paulo.

In 2022, Niterói Contemporary Art Museum (MAC Niterói), Brazil, presented Retrabalho, a solo show of Casemiro’s work. The same year Museu Mineiro, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, held a solo exhibition of the artist’s work, titled Oito horas não são um dia. His work in the permanent collection of MAC Niterói. Group shows featuring Casemiro include Quando ícaro sobe ao céu at Mackenzie University,São Paulo; Acervo Rotativo at Oficina Cultural Oswald de Andrade, São Paulo; Bolhas Siderais and Espumas Siderais, at Marli Matsumoto Arte Contemporânea, São Paulo; 13th Bienal de Arquitetura de São Paulo; Contra o silêncio dos espaços infinitos at Massapê Projetos, Massapê, Brazil; and 43rd Waldemar Belisário Plastic Arts Salon, Ilhabela, Brazil.

Anderson Borba (born 1972, Santos, Brazil) lives and works in London.

Borba studied at the Alternative MFA program at the School of the Damned and completed an MFA in Sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art in London.Among his solo exhibitions are I’ve Seen One of These, Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo, (2022); The End Begins at the Leaf — Anderson Borba & Antonio Tarsis, BeAdvisors Art, London, (2021); Anderson Borba & Alex Canonico, Kupfer Gallery, London, (2021) and Ride the Worm, Set Gallery, London, (2018). He has also participated in group shows: I Could Eat You, Clearing + Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel + Madragoa, Casa de Cultura da Comporta, Comporta, Portugal (2022); Tragédia!, Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo, (2022); The Apple Tree, Union Pacific Gallery, London, (2021); Off the Grid, Lamb Gallery, London, (2021); O Canto do Bode, Casa da Cultura da Comporta, Comporta, Portugal (2020); Antifacismo Tropical, Queen Adelaide, London, (2019); Everything Must Go, Assembly Point Gallery, London, (2019); and Sindyyyy, Set Gallery, London, (2019).Residencies and prizes include: 2022 NTH Space, Turin, Italy; 2020 Herbert Seaborn Memorial Scholarship Prize, Slade School of Fine Arts, London; Gilbert Bayes Scholarship 2019; Yitzhak Danziger, MFA Slade Scholarship, 2015; and AA2A artist residence, Sheffield University, Sheffield, UK.

Darks Miranda (born 1985 in Santos, Brazil) lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.

Miranda’s works has been exhibited at the Tate Modern, London; Galeria Ibeu, Rio de Janeiro; Galeria Athena, Rio de Janeiro; MAR - Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro; MAM-RJ (Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro; SESC Pinheiros, São Paulo; Teatro Municipal, São Paulo; Oscar Niemeyer Museum, Curitiba, Brazil; José de Guimarães International Arts Center, Guimarães, Portugal; and Filmhuis Cavia, Amsterdam,The Netherlands. In 2020 Instituto Moreira Salles, Brazil, and The Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia commissioned the artist to create a new series of works. In 2022 the first solo show of Miranda’s work, titled Uma noite perigosa na ilha de Vulcano, opened at Carpintaria, Rio de Janeiro. Miranda’s first solo show in São Paulo, Veneno, meu companheiro, will open at Projeto Vênus this year.