CRANIO

curated by Alexandre Araujo Bispo

Luis Maluf Gallery in Jardins is proud to announce the next solo exhibition by renowned artist Cranio, curated by Alexandre Araujo Bispo. Recognised for his urban art that combines vibrant social criticism with a unique visual poetics, Cranio translates the complex relationships between identity, the environment and urbanity in his works.

The general opening for visitors takes place on 12 December, from 2pm to 7pm, and the exhibition will run until 15 January 2025.

10 Years – Luis Maluf Art Gallery

Aline Bispo Aline Moreno Antonio Bokel Barbara Basseto Bu’ú Kennedy Cranio Daniela Busarello Deco Adjiman Desirée Feldmann Edu Silva Janet Vollebregt Karola Braga Leandra Espírito Santo Licida Vidal Raphael Sagarra_finok Shizue Sakamoto Tatiane Freitas Vhils    Zanini de Zanine

‘To dream is to wake up inward,’ said the poet Mario Quintana. And it was with this inner awakening that Luis followed his instinct 10 years ago and opened the first unit of his eponymous gallery in São Paulo, a space whose purpose from the outset was to encourage and foster contemporary art. But the story we are celebrating today began years earlier and deserves to be remembered on this date.

When he was younger, Luis lived in a mixed-use building that housed residential flats as well as artists’ studios, where countless creative meetings took place. It was in this vivid environment that he found comfort, imbued with the smell of paint and the many conversations about the cultural milieu. There, the dream of being an artist was born, which soon sharpened the business acumen he discovered as a gift. He experimented in a few related areas until he decided to become an entrepreneur. So the middle-class young man bought a kombi with a colleague and started selling works by artists he liked on the streets of São Paulo.

From then on, his bond with the arts blossomed, took many directions and formats and was consolidated through a deep relationship with the city. Public art brought Luis closer to architecture, public space and a possible project for society. It made him interested in everything that surrounds it, from concrete to nature, from noise to subversion. It led him to look at works and artists without preconceptions, seeking out the diversity of languages, genres and forms, as well as discussions and reflections on the role of the market in this vast network of interconnections.

She invested time and resources in opening a new gallery in the Barra Funda neighbourhood, balancing the commercial and conceptual sides and even putting more emphasis on national production and on innovative and necessary projects, such as the Artist Residency, now in its fourth edition, expanding the possibilities of artistic practice and the education and training of visual artists around the country.

On this path, his attentive gaze met that of many artists whose lines of research include the idea of territory, be it celestial or earthly. Through art, they develop works that discuss these universes and their relationship with the world. This rich and plural process has made this trajectory, and consequently this celebration, possible. For this date, artists represented today by Luis Maluf Galeria de Arte have developed new works, all interconnected with the founder’s trajectory, but also that speak to the spatiality of the region where we are located. Thus, the group show presented at the Barra Funda unit is a reflection and an invitation to think about this vast creative and multidisciplinary universe that surrounds us internally and externally.

— Ana Carolina Ralston

De tudo fica um pouco
[A bit of everything remains]

Mônica Ventura and Deco Adjiman

“A little remains oscillating
at the mouths of rivers
and the fish don’t avoid it,
a little: it’s not in the books”
(Excerpt from the poem Resíduos,
by Carlos Drummond de Andrade)

Discussing time and the origin of ourselves and everything around us is an arduous task. Before a chronology, time is an anthology, a landscape inhabited by the body, a journey before progression, a way of predisposing beings in the cosmos. It is about the passage of this time, its intertwining with ancestry and its inevitable relationship with the transformation of matter that the dialog contained in De tudo fica um pouco, an exhibition that brings together a cross-section of the prolific artistic production of Mônica Ventura and Deco Adjiman, on show at Galeria Luis Maluf, is about.

In this sphere, such an understanding meets the reflections of poet and essayist Leda Maria Martins and her concept of spiral time, a perception that intertwines the idea that the past inhabits the present and the future, which means that events, stripped of a linear chronology, are in the process of a perennial metamorphosis and, concomitantly, correlated. Thus, experiencing time means inhabiting a curvilinear temporality, conceived as a scroll that simultaneously seals and reveals, rolls up and unrolls the temporal instances that make up the subject. This temporal union is revealed in the work of both artists in question. Through his brush and the three-dimensional forms he builds, Ventura seeks to amplify his ancestral history. He harks back to Afro-Amerindian cosmogonies, connecting myths and past references and transporting them to the present day. Adjiman, on the other hand, makes the journey his temporal expansion. And on this journey, the artist collects, assembles and constructs narratives imbued with poetry to talk about the various possible paths in the world.

The exhibition route is punctuated by a series of large oil paintings by Mônica Ventura. Entitled Alteia (I, II and IV), from 2024, the works have contours that remind us of the Zangbetos, voodoo guardians of the night in Yoruba cults. These spirits move through music and protect the beings around them. The ancestral spiritual relationship that emerges in Ventura’s paintings permeates his entire production. Whether in two- or three-dimensional form, the artist anthropomorphizes her language, leading us to question the forms and stereotypes we inhabit and replicate. At another point, Ventura welcomes us with her recognizable gourds on which she draws cosmogonic narratives that symbolize the beginning of everything and replicate symbologies from human history.

If the past is the place of accumulative knowledge and experience, which consequently inhabits the present and the future, Deco Adjiman accesses this ancestry by touching the earth. His works each find the time of things in order to highlight the possible dimension to be reached during the journey. Measuring the temporality of this experience can be seen in works such as Travessia or the seven days or 183 kilometers on the floor of Rosa, from 2024. With wood, iron, string and earth, the artist produced what symbolizes his passage through the backlands of Minas Gerais, one of the routes taken by Riobaldo, the central character in João Guimarães Rosa’s classic Grande Sertão: Veredas. Collecting the traces that represent our experience and passage through this world is also in Coleção de Chão, from 2021. The work, made up of 54 small jars with different sedimentary compositions, encourages reflection on the uniqueness of each space, but the charm of its composition as a single floor. The piece is accompanied by an essay written by the artist, in which he muses on the definitions of territory.

Literature and, consequently, words are an essential part of Adjiman’s process, as well as the final object of his work. Verses are contained explicitly or delicately inserted subjectively throughout his work. In Cadernos de andaleço III, he transcribes phrases found in books and publications that have marked his experiences, as well as some created by the artist himself. In De tudo fica um pouco, from 2024, Adjiman transforms the classic encyclopedias, now forgotten, into other lives, inserting dried leaves collected from the surroundings into the pages. If, as Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962) reminds us, man will wonder indefinitely what mud, earth or clay he himself is made of, here we present a handful of spaces, cosmologies and interpretations that mix the possibilities of being in a spiral time. And from all this, a little bit of us remains in the world.

— Ana Carolina Ralston

Somatória de Forças [Summation of Forces]

It’s pure coincidence that Aline and I, both from São Paulo of Bahian descent, have the same surname. We and so many other ‘Bispos’ are probably descended from a certain Antônio Nicanor de Alcântara Bispo, who was, at the end of the 19th century, the 2nd secretary of the Sociedade Beneficente União Filantrópica dos Artistas, founded in Salvador in 1889. Beyond this distant kinship, we are also linked by a common interest in the forces of Afro-Brazilian sacredness.

Aline, who has been working on this theme in her work for almost a decade, follows the trail blazed by artists who came before her, and stands alongside her contemporaries in researching the experience of the sacred in Afro-Brazilian art. Just to name a few, among many others, artists: Arthur Bispo do Rosário, Mestre Didi, Heitor dos Prazeres, Ronaldo Rêgo, Djanira da Motta e Silva, José Adário, Moisés Patrício, Eneida Sanches, Raquel Cambinda, Antônio Obá, Sheyla Ayó, Nádia Taquari, Rodrigo Bueno, Maria Auxiliadora, Niobe Xandó, Carybé, Terciliano Júnior, Chico Tabibuia, Ana Pi, Renata Felinto, Silvana Mendes, Antonio Pulquerio, Denise Camargo. This number of names shows that Aline Bispo is not alone in this artistic circuit that draws its poetic strength from the sacred.

In the solo exhibition Somatória de forças, the artist, whose paintings can be seen on the gables of buildings in the vicinity of Luis Maluf (Barra Funda), presents works produced over the last five years, some of them new, made under the inspiration of contact with more or less well-known festivals in the Afro-Brazilian calendar: Bará do Mercado, Festa de Nossa Senhora da Boa Morte, 02 de Fevereiro, Nossa Senhora Aparecida, Feira de Baiano, etc.

A série Orixás, encantados, santos e voduns, de 2023, como o próprio nome assinala, aproxima em um único gesto poético a estética complexa inerente às religiões afro-brasileiras que, resultantes da diáspora, misturam referências sagradas em um jogo de revela-esconde. Assim, onde se vê a forma de um santo católico, em sua versão revestido de tecido estampado, vê-se também uma divindade africana, seja porque um fio de contas colorido está ali como um lembrete ou porque o nome da obra indica tratar-se de deuses africanos e afro-brasileiros.

Among the paintings, the brushstrokes, sometimes smooth and sometimes expressive, take up sacred icons such as Iemanjá, Santo Antônio, São Benedito, the women of Boa Morte and a Babá (father in Yoruba). Saint Anthony, still syncretised on the African continent with Exú, is positioned near the entrance to the gallery. Covered in black fabric, under his feet are jars of coins and strips of satin suggesting the multiplication of paths.

The palette used by the artist is spread throughout the exhibition: blue, white, black and red. Although these colours are widely known by their European names, in the Angolan Candomblé and Jeje Nagô traditions they are given their own ritual names. Thus, in the first tradition, white is luvemba, red tukule or tukula, black kala; in the second, blue is waji, red osun and white efun. How much plastic beauty emerges from the juxtaposition of these colours!

It is blue that organises the photographic composition of Asunción, from 2019. In this series, Aline offers three identical versions of Our Lady of Aparecida, but with different models. Kicked off national television in 1995, here and in other parts of the exhibition the patron saint of Brazil is materialised in young women. This is a state of multiplied spiritual ascension. Their hands hold the same crucifix of pearl and metal acorns. Another incarnation of the patron saint are the plaster representations produced by the sacred industry, modified, however, by covering them in coloured fabrics.

The exhibition features two flags printed with the image of the twins Cosme and Damião, also known by the Nagô term Ibeji. Aline also explores the shape of an altar, inspired by the relationship of opposition and complementarity between familiar spirits – rada – or aggressive spirits – petro, present in the Haitian Vodou religion. This reference to Voodoo gives the exhibition environment a sense of transition between zones of light and shadow.

With a mixture of sacred references as an abundant ingredient in her poetics, Aline Bispo pursues a path in which she recognises the value of syncretism in Brazilian culture, understanding that despite its negative aspects, in the sense that historically it has led to the concealment of cultural practices of African origins, it has also generated unprecedented strengths.

In 2024, studies on Afro-Brazilian art, the landmark of which is Nina Rodrigues’ text, As bellas artes dos colonos pretos – a esculptura, from 1904, will be 120 years old. At this time, initiatives such as the Somatória de forças exhibition broaden and strengthen knowledge about the multifaceted history of plastic expressions of faith in the country, which continues to inspire the field of visual arts.

We would like to thank Luis Maluf and his team for their support and partnership in building this exhibition.

— Alexandre Araujo Bispo

Imagens Preenchedoras [Filling Images]

Marvellous things sleep under the skin of words

One of the most important genres of medieval Islamic literature dealt with the wonders of creation, or mirabilia. Like Western medieval literature, these manuscripts brought together narratives about countless supernatural beings, but they also described the immensity and diversity of nature: the seas, the rivers, the mountains. They discussed the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms while expressing astonishment at the inexplicable, mysterious and fantastic. Treatises on the natural sciences, magic and, why not, poetry were brought together in a single work. Its most popular exponent was written by Zakariyya al-Qazwini (1203-1283), Wonders of Things and Miraculous Aspects of Existing Things.

In her first solo exhibition at Galeria Luis Maluf in São Paulo, artist Desirée Feldmann is presenting a set of new works entitled ‘Filling Images’. In the artist’s words, the title ‘is the name given to the set of drawings I’ve been working on since 2021, and which contain in their essence codes of symbols and colours that form, in an abstract and unconventional way, insignia of protection.’ The exhibition brings together works that result from the artist’s pictorial and material research process through the spatial unfoldings originating from the homonymous series of drawings of these ‘amulet-images’.

This production stems from his enquiries into the field of painting and the remote relationships established over time between humans and the mysteries of nature, which have led them to imagine and represent. Faced with sculptures and objects made of fabric, soft volumes and a colour palette carefully articulated by the organic composition of forms that are born from one another, the exhibition invites us to access some of the senses present in our earliest experiences of things in the world. By primordial experiences we can understand everything from those first memories we have to those remarkable experiences capable of producing awe, enchantment and/or completely re-signifying previous memories.

The works also invite us to visually perceive them gradually: the pieces are constituted by the superimposition of multiple hollow planes. Layers of modular structures made of coloured fabric and upholstery produce concavities and sinuous volumes through accumulation and overlapping. Each shape seems to be born from within another, and from another. One colour is born after another has been repeated a few times within itself, creating a vibrational field of its own. Coloured layers multiply and settle in space, like the pictorial gesture on a flat surface or like the different stratigraphic layers of a mountain in nature, designating the different ages of the Earth.

Little by little, Filling Images offers us the possibility of entering a cosmic dialogue operated in the contact of living bodies with matter, with the mystery of beginnings, endings and the infinite memory of time. We could then, according to this exercise in imagination, enter a space with no defined time, but filled with all the temporal layers imaginable. These sediments produce their own rhythms and temporalities, while the names that designate each work suggest varied images of existing or imaginary beings, bodily sensations, landscapes, cosmic objects, orientation tools, offerings, objects made for protection, objects of devotion.

We come across this restlessness in the face of the time present in things in a text written by the artist in 2022 in which she describes a hike while climbing a mountain. Her text also tells us about the geological process that determines the creation of these formations: mountains are born in cracks, in the encounter between one tectonic plate and another. In other words, mountains are born, according to this image, from the void between two plates.

Imagining the mountain as a living, pulsating entity, or as part (or relative) of an even larger organism would resonate with everything that rests on it. A mountain that was once submerged in a great ocean harbours shells that today seem foreign to the cold, arid landscape they inhabit. The shell carries with it the fossilised memory of an aquatic era, even though it is now far removed from that ancient marine home. Our ability to touch these other temporal, spatial and symbolic dimensions for a moment shows us that fabulation runs through us in the form of questions addressed so often to the invisible. Because ‘every form holds a life’, as Gaston Bachelard would say. And every life needs a magical breath to fill its form, enchanting it, otherwise it wouldn’t be life.

If, for Jorge Luis Borges, writing and reading separate us from the world through the possibility of producing fantastic parallel universes by imagining what doesn’t exist or that we don’t know, we can think that the experience of art also performs the opposite function by connecting us directly to the vital core of the most prosaic things that inhabit everyday life, relationships and the world. Thinking about such Wonders of Things and Miraculous Aspects of Existing Things is also about making oneself available to perceive and implicate oneself in some way with this inevitable, sometimes terrible and also fruitful interdependence that delimits our material and soul existence by intertwining all beings.

Desirée Feldmann thus summons up an enchanted and fertile memory of things, of wonders hidden by the despair of the times, bringing them together in soft, resonant and dispersed forms: a diving goggle, a watch, a shell, a flower as an offering, a mountain viewpoint, a lighthouse, a totem, a Venus and a moon take us on a long journey through words, their worlds and the vibrant matter outside them, close to us. Filling Images claims the possibility of activating the magical meanings present in a primordial production of poetry that shapes the human experience. – Yana Tamayo

1 Newsletter produced by Desirée Feldmann. Text published on 15/12/2022 and accessible at https://open.substack.com/pub/desireefeldmann/p/caderno-de-notas-pag-14-projeto-33?r=4fx97&utm_medium=ios 2 Bachelard, Gaston. The poetics of space. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1993. 3 Luiz Antonio Simas and Luiz Rufino tell us ‘the opposite of life is not death, the opposite of life is disenchantment’. In Simas, Luiz Antonio and Rufino, Luiz. Encantamento: on the politics of life. 1st Ed. – Mórula Editorial, 2020.

Oceano Febril

Na primeira mostra individual da artista Licida Vidal (São Paulo, 1984), “Oceano Febril”, no Galpão da Luis Maluf Galeria, o público é surpreendido com um conjunto de obras – duas grandes instalações, seis trabalhos em menor escala e uma série de três vídeos – que se articulam como sistemas em atividade. Os trabalhos poderiam ser descritos como organismos vivos ou, talvez mais precisamente, como construções orgânicas que se associam a elementos como minerais, vegetais, fungos e, eventualmente, pequenos animais como larvas e insetos que interagem e se relacionam nesses ambientes construídos.

As duas instalações, “terral” e “entre a fonte e a foz” são trabalhos que se apropriam da arquitetura da galeria: penduram-se no teto, amarram-se nas vigas, contornam paredes e transformam o espaço – de concreto – num campo fértil, cheio de movimento, em que formas de vida e novas estruturas orgânicas podem surgir. As matérias principais das instalações são terra, argila e água. Dentro desses dois trabalhos, e entre eles, a água circula, penetra volumes de terra, entra e sai de mangueiras, expande-se pelo chão. A água desperta sementes e fazendo-as brotarem, alimenta plantas comestíveis, passa através de filtros, escorre criando pequenas perturbações na lâmina d’água que ocupa grande parte do mezanino. Goteja, limpa, caindo dessas “cabaças de cerâmica” e vaza de um andar para outro da galeria, num movimento vertical que contrasta com a horizontalidade dos lagos, rios e mares, lembrando mais a chuva ou uma queda d’água minguada em tempos de seca.

Trazer a água como matéria plástica é um grande desafio que o trabalho de Licida se propõe. Nosso planeta e nossos corpos são feitos de água, elemento tão ordinário quanto imprescindível para a vida. Brigar com a água é batalha perdida – as  recentes inundações no Rio Grande do Sul talvez evidenciem isso da forma mais bruta e trágica. O trato com água exige cuidado: respeito aos fluxos, vazões e a sua forma própria de movimento. Seu peso e pressão aparecem como fortes resistências ao ser manipulada. Olhando tanto para grandes obras de engenharia civil, que desviam o curso de rios, quanto para o ofício de pescadores, pedreiros, encanadores, agricultores, entre tantos que cotidianamente lidam com a água, Licida vai formando um repertório de práticas e possibilidades de manejo. É na negociação constante com aquilo que é próprio da água: ser informe, afeita à dissolução, à evaporação, sua capacidade de permanecer escondida, de penetrar no subterrâneo e, ao mesmo tempo, sua presença física em grande volumes acumulados (oceanos, rios, represas), suas qualidades visuais (superfícies extensas, reflexivas, sensíveis até mesmo à ação sutil do vento) e sua potência – quase mágica – de disparar processos de vida, que se situam os trabalhos.

Nas obras menores, que ocupam a primeira sala, as formas recipientes são constantes: assim como as redes de tecido de “terral” e nos filtros de “entre a fonte e a foz”, aqui encontramos casulos, tigelas, aquários-terrários, bolhas, elementos capazes de reter matérias distintas. Funcionam também como membranas permeáveis que fazem trocas do meio externo com o interno, mas sempre protegendo e envolvendo aquilo que está dentro dele. Os trabalhos partem de uma observação daquilo que costumamos chamar de natureza, onde os processos de troca, interação, nascimento, morte, criação, destruição parecem ter mais autonomia em relação às estratégias de controle desenvolvidas pela humanidade ao longo do tempo. São como pequenos acontecimentos aos quais a artista está atenta e busca apreender em seu fazer: o lampejo de um vagalume, a formação rugosa da casca de uma ostra, a cristalização da água salina, a textura de um casulo.

Nesse conjunto de obras exposto em “Oceano Febril” vemos o trabalho que Licida Vidal desenvolve, dentro do campo da arte, há mais de cinco anos. São processos longos de experimentação, montagem, desvios, retornos. De certo modo, seus trabalhos nunca estão finalizados, pois colocam-se junto ao devir da natureza. Exigem cuidados, atenção, reestruturação. Aqueles que convivem com os trabalhos de Licida são chamados a serem também seus cuidadores: a pesquisarem seus processos internos, como devem ser mantidos, em que lugares podem ser instalados. Estabelece-se assim um vínculo de responsabilidade, cumplicidade e afeto. — Thaís Rivitti