Geoneide Brandão, "Oil on the need to materialize the impossible", 2022. Photo: Gabi Lisboa
Geoneide Brandão, "Oil on the need to materialize the impossible", 2022. Photo: Gabi Lisboa

A new generation emerges in the Brazilian visual arts scene with a lively dialogue, understanding life and each work as an inaugural act. Four young artists, from different regions, seem to breathe and interpret the same restlessness of this moment of sociopolitical and cultural changes. 

Sheets, in striped, checkered tricoline and in so many colors, seem to float on the wide terrace of Casa do Parque, in Alto de Pinheiros, a neighborhood in São Paulo, confirming the lightness with which Leandro Muniz, 29 years old, develops Sunday, his recent exhibition. Each piece of fabric has a different pattern and receives layers of paint in the small squares and rectangles that he arbitrarily chose to paint. 

“I am interested in the identification of the work with the house, which is Casa do Parque, a modernist architectural project whose elements are opposed to vernacular elements such as the tricoline”. The chromatic relations employed were worked on by Leandro for about a year. The paintings are made up of many layers and procedures, some are more material and others are almost transparent. “The fabrics contribute a lot, they are pictorial in themselves, one of them, with geometric matrices, refers to Paul Klee”.

As Leandro defines it, the work is polysemic, because it allows both textual and more generic readings. The set is also imagery with a small painting of the landscape, vegetation, waterfall, in an apparently prosaic dialogue. The brushstrokes happen on the front and back of the fabric, which makes the visitor move all the time, between sheets. Involved in this scenario, I remember a very special day, film by Ettore Scola, about Hitler's arrival in Italy, starring Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni. There is a long dialogue between the actors between sheets on clotheslines, a scene from Italian neorealism of the 1940s.

Returning to the installation Sunday, which can be an ode to expanded painting, the white wall at the entrance that leads the visitor to the installation stands out. On top of it, Leandro draws tiles with irregular black lines, creating movement. The painting refers to the service areas tiled in white and dialogues with the sheets. For a teenager who left home at age 16, Leandro has not lost focus on his life project. He graduated in visual arts from ECA-USP, is doing a master's degree and curating.

“The danger of life is to asphyxiate under the weight of existence”. The phrase by the philosopher María Zambrano does not shake Fabiana Wolf, 27 years old from Sergipe who, at 20, left Aracaju and landed in the capital of São Paulo. Now she has her first exhibition at Galeria São Paulo Flutuante, in the Barra Funda neighborhood. With uncommon courage for a beginner, she exposes Obituary, a five-meter canvas, made under the impact of the death of the mother and stepfather, by covid-19. "I'm also referring to the enormous number of people who have died around the world." 

His neo-expressionist painting brings Basquiat's gestures and mixes texts, dates and a tangle of nervous strokes. But where did the courage to face such a dimension come from? “I was very anxious about everything that happened to me and, in Brazil, I kept many things inside me. It was a vomit”. It took Fabiana just a week to complete the painting, which uses black as a guiding principle. In another work, Trap, she distills her indignation about today's political moment in an intense red and leaves a synthetic message: “Out”. All the screens were made this year and dialogue with each other. Self-taught, his pictorial construction is elaborated from experiences worked with chalk, oil pastel and acrylic paint. 

Its purpose, artistic and political, emerges in all the works exhibited at São Paulo Flutuante, by Regina Boni, known for always encouraging young artists. With a trained eye and knowledge accumulated over decades, the gallerist saw Fabiana's works, brought by her partner and fellow artist Manu Maltez, and invited her to her first exhibition. Fabiana says that preserving her independence is fundamental. “I was never very interested in the market, my concern was not to be famous, to sell a lot.” She has always maintained a certain resistance to the circuit, but believes that now things can change. Regina Boni considers Fabiana's work to be extremely mature for a young artist. “I have no doubt about the promising path it will take.” 

Defined by himself as a walker, R. Trompaz, 33, usually walks the streets of São Paulo. During these wanderings, he passed in front of São Paulo Flutuante, entered with his portfolio under his arm. Regina received him, approved what she saw and invited him to exhibit. Influenced by rappers Emicida and Racionais MC's, among other artists from the same social matrix, he says he learned a lot from musicians, especially reflecting on Brazil's structural inequality. R. Trompaz lives in the Capão Redondo neighborhood, on the outskirts of São Paulo, enjoys skateboarding and enhances his visual repertoire from living with the city. 

In the black and white drawings, he stamps the ills of the rulers, the trigger for his production. “Everything I produce comes from the social criticism that is linked to the Social Segregation Geographically Widespread project (Ssge)”. The images are juxtaposed, mixed, interconnected and capture scenes of floods in the periphery, precarious housing, as well as middle-class buildings spared from tragedies, with the influence of Livio Abramo. The paintings, on the other hand, bring a geometric abstractionism developed with quick brushstrokes, executed with acrylic varnish and pigment powder. R.Trompaz has a degree in visual arts from Belas Artes and expects to start a new cycle. 

A maturidade with which Geoneide Brandão approaches the universe LGBTQIA+ does not match her 22 years. The repertoire brings intimate scenes of queer bodies painted from the photography he learned using a cell phone when he was 14 years old and lived in Ouro Branco, in the hinterland of Alagoas. “At the age of 16 I was already dedicating myself to painting within this process and for a year I have been living in Recife where I attend the collective studio Escadaria, with a group of young people”. Geoneide works from the body and its symbologies. “My interest focuses on sexuality, gender issues and human relations as a whole”.

His painting, executed with wide and continuous brushstrokes, is gaining space. She is currently exhibiting at the collective Reforest, at Christal Galeria, a new cultural space in Recife, where he has a commissioned work. was chosen through a public notice and shows two works from the series burning love, who reflects questions about affection and intimacy of the body. In September, she was selected in the call of Acute Voices Collective, curated by Bruna Fernanda, Érica Burini, Khadig Fares and Thais Rivitti, which resulted in the exhibition We live for this, member of the public call VoA 2022-2023, for female artists and non-binary people, which took place at Workshop 397 and in the shed Galeria Vermelho, both in Barra Funda, in São Paulo. The exhibition brought together artists from all over Brazil and raised questions pertinent to the cause. It also recently went through the sieve of an edict in Canada. Visual arts student at the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE), one of her focuses is researching the intersections between body, gender and sexuality linked to questions of affection, otherness and politics.

As for the market, she says she is insecure, because she doesn't know to what extent a young woman like her, who addresses a topic of this nature, will be able to establish herself. “The art scene in Recife is open, I communicate with incredible artists from whom I learn a lot. The market is conservative, people who have money don't want to invest in this topic”. With many challenges, Geoneide's talent opens doors in other spheres, she is one of the artists from the New Acquisitions collection, from Banco do Nordeste.

Finally, Regina Boni leaves the message. “If in an important newspaper, in which, among other famous Brazilian names, works by Emmanuel Araújo, artist from Bahia, recently deceased and never recognized in life as the great creator he always was, [it's because] posthumous recognition is more common in our capitalist and unjust country. Hence the importance of trader open your eyes to new names. New people. New ideas. Believing in new futures”.


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