This is a place where bodies can express what, out there, would be cause for scandal. We embrace divine decadence amid the traces of a thousand nights in which someone deliberately chose not to hold back. The excitement sounds too intense to be innocent.

Behind every work, one can always sense something harsher pulsing beneath the surface. Nothing is consumed with ease. The freedom heralded in one work is, in the one next to it, cast into doubt. They oscillate between excess and restraint, pleasure and violence, as if each were staging a different act of the same show.

By refusing to follow in their mothers’ footsteps, these artists invite us to contemplate—and also to become complicit in—what we see. The night belongs to them, and here, opposing emotions can be exactly the same thing. For perhaps this is what it means to live: to recognize that desire and vertigo never come apart.

LEONARDO MACIEL