DIVINE DECADENCE

This is a place where bodies can express what, outside, would be cause for scandal. We embrace divine decadence amidst the remnants of a thousand nights where someone deliberately chose not to hold back. The excitement sounds too loud to be innocent…

Behind each work, one can always sense something harsher pulsating. Nothing surrenders without resistance. The freedom announced in one piece is, in the adjacent work, cast into suspicion. They oscillate between excess and restraint, pleasure and violence, as if each one staged a different act of the same spectacle.

From one work to another, our senses are affected. Gradually, we become accomplices. The exhibition begins with Maria La Sangre, whose figure observes us in silence, as if inviting us to shed our identity. When we encounter Adriana Ferla's mirror, we no longer recognize ourselves. Mari Sperandio organizes hundreds of lipsticks as an archive of the conventions that shape femininity. Fernanda d’Boer's almost-kiss announces the threat that Aleksey d’Havicyon does not allow us to forget. Alana Ritzmann turns words into an act of insubmission. Mah Ferreira exposes violence against the female body. In Sofia Colucci, the body dissolves. In Adriana Conti Melo, it loses its contours. Catharina Suleiman transforms promises into wounds. Ilka Lemos's control mechanisms hang over the room, while Kika Rufino recomposes Venus from her own fragments. Érika Miglioli preserves the vestiges of intimacy. Tuca Sodré's mouth is full of pleasure and brutality, and as night falls, Luana Hymans returns us to everyday life, where none of these forces cease to operate.

The night is theirs, and opposing feelings can be, here, exactly the same thing. Perhaps this is what living means: recognizing that desire and vertigo never arrive separately.

LEONARDO MACIEL