ARTE!✱ – Nicolas, tell us a little about your career. It’s rare to find managers of institutions so young. How old are you?
I was born in Cachoeiro de Itapemirim, in the south of Espírito Santo, in 1987, and I have always lived outside the state. I lived in the state of Rio, in Goiânia and in Salvador. I entered the School of Fine Arts at UFBA in 2006, with the understanding that I wanted to be an artist. I identified with photography and, early on, I understood that this would be my main research.
I produced a lot during my time at university. At the time, we had a group of artist friends, all from the School of Fine Arts. We proposed various projects and put together exhibitions, many of them independent, in institutional spaces such as Galeria do Conselho, Instituto Cervantes, Aliança Francesa, Galeria de Arte do ACBEU, among others. Individually, through selection in public calls: the Salão Regional da Bahia (Funceb), Bienal do Recôncavo and Salão da Bahia, at the Museu de Arte Moderna (MAM Bahia). Between 2008 and 2011, I occupied several exhibition spaces in Salvador, and these activities put me on some circuits.
My research as an artist focuses on images, on thinking about issues related to image-culture and image-art. The body has always been a focus of attention to which I have dedicated myself (and continue to dedicate myself): the body of the other, the relations of desire, the relations of power that the body exercises and to which it is also subjected in culture. At a certain point, I also began to understand my place as a black artist armed with a camera. Having the power to define images – which images and how! The discourses and the narratives. Because the clash, in truth, seems inseparable and definitive: that the existence and action of my body – personally – permeate the work and images that I produce.
From there, taking a historical leap in this narrative, I return to Espírito Santo. I came to Vitória in 2012, and completed my master's degree in the Postgraduate Program in Arts at UFES. During my academic career, I was a substitute teacher, as well as a TCC advisor for Distance Learning in Arts, at the same University, between 2016 and 2018. At that time, working in the Department of Visual Arts and immersed in an academic experience, I understood that teaching – giving classes – was a work of art, in a way, like a curatorial arrangement: the possibility of organizing concepts, texts, images and artists. Of extending my work in the discursive space that is the University, and by far, the best place to be an artist.
ARTE!✱ – And when did you start managing cultural spaces?
In 2019, I was invited to join the Secretariat of Culture of the State of Espírito Santo and take on the coordination of Galeria Homero Massena, which is a traditional visual arts space in our scenario. An interesting fact is that the Gallery was the first place I visited when I arrived in Vitória, in 2012. In 2015, I exhibited at the Gallery a research project that I had been developing since 2011, in Salvador, through the Visual Arts Notice of Funcultura (Secult). The exhibition Esta Aporia: Uma Liturgia do Desejo comprised a collection of black and white photographs, including landscapes and symbolic gestures of naked male bodies in the landscape (which is the language and aesthetics with which I have worked for 20 years), trying to understand how desire is a force that, while driving us, can also weaken us as subjects, and, mainly, forcing the photographic image into its devotional place. At the end of the exhibition, I proposed an action/video installation inside the Capela Santa Luzia – a chapel with colonial architecture, dating back to 1537, which in the 1970s was the Galeria Arte e Pesquisa da UFES and witnessed several experimental manifestations. This research also developed into Esta Aporia: AMENSAL, presented at Casa Porto das Artes Plásticas in 2016, also selected by the Funcultura Public Notices.
I said all this to say that I have an emotional relationship with Galeria Homero Massena. And having the opportunity to contribute, during its management, to the thinking of this space was a privilege for me! Because one of the highlights, in almost 50 years of the Gallery, is that many artists from Espírito Santo who are now recognized in their careers exhibited at Homero Massena. It has always been a space for artistic experimentation, responding to and spanning these five decades. In some way, it tells us a history of art from here on.
ARTE!✱ – In addition to the exhibitions that the gallery produces through the Visual Arts Notice of Funcultura do Estado, what were the projects that the gallery itself proposed that strengthened this personality?
During my tenure at Homero, in its main mission as a public art space and its position in the artistic scene throughout its years of operation, I reinforced its openness to new artistic production. Thus, in parallel with the production of the exhibitions selected by the Funcultura Calls for Proposals, we activated a program that could strengthen these dialogues: three editions of the Videografias Exhibition (2019–2021), the Research and Training Cycle (2019) and two editions of the Image Forum (2020–2021), all with national scope.
The video exhibitions had three sections with artists not only from Espírito Santo: Videographies of the Body, Videographies of the Environment and Videographies of Conviviality — the last two during the pandemic, being some of the first actions of the Department of Culture with the support of TVE broadcasting. Also during the pandemic, we held two Image Forums: Construction of Urgent Images and Images in Transit. These were discursive actions bringing together researchers, artists and educational actions – resulting in two printed publications and exhibitions, with more than 50 artists from all over the country. These activities, through national public calls, allowed me to access young artists from other places and brought greater attention to a curatorial exercise that I was beginning to do.
Thinking about articulating outside the state is a concern. Right at the beginning of my coordination at the Gallery, we proposed a series of lectures that accompanied the exhibitions scheduled in the calendar. The Research and Training Series invited artists from the Espírito Santo scene, such as Hilal Sami Hilal, and researchers such as Tatiana Rosa, to participate in some of the proposed debates. It also introduced and brought to Vitória important names in national contemporary art, such as researcher Guilherme Marcondes, artists Ayrson Heráclito and Paulo Nazareth, and the founding curator of the Videobrasil Cultural Association, Solange Farkas. I believe that this moment was important for repositioning us in the national circuit, in addition to strengthening the Gallery itself as a space for discussion of contemporary art.
The historical isolation of Espírito Santo is almost a trauma, but our vibrant production in the visual arts has transcended borders and become detached from these erasures. We must consider that public incentives, such as the 16 uninterrupted years of Funcultura, and especially the current administration of the Government and the Department of Culture (since 2019), have invested in increasing resources and transfers, and have contributed significantly to the production, articulation and exchange of our production in the visual arts, which has increasingly been shown on national and international scenes. Artistic production has truly managed to physically transcend the territory, and, obviously, it is the merit of each artist in their paths and “runs”, on the battlefronts that all of us, in the arts, persistently face. I have great respect and pride for what we are all contributing to this history.
ARTE!✱ – And who was Homer Massena?
Homero Massena was one of the great names in Espírito Santo art – despite being from Minas Gerais – and based in Espírito Santo, he represented the state’s landscape in his work. He lived in Prainha, one of the first neighborhoods in Vila Velha, at the foot of the hill that houses the Convento da Penha – which, by the way, he portrayed many times. Although he is linked to modernism, his style has a lot of impressionism.
Homer Massena is a fundamental figure in the artistic repertoire here, and his paintings span generations, and they also deserve to be reviewed discursively, based on current debates.
Today, the house where he lived is the Homero Massena Museum, managed by the Vila Velha City Hall. The Homero Massena Gallery, managed by the State Department of Culture, opened in 1977, pays homage to and, in some way, strengthens the link between history and the continuity of contemporary art from here on.
ARTE!✱ – When did you take over as director of MAES? And how have you perceived your performance?
In February 2022, I took over as Director of the Espírito Santo Art Museum, MAES. The museum had been closed for a few years due to a renovation process that physically restructured the internal spaces, both administrative and exhibition space. This process took place between 2016 and 2019; in 2020, the museum was reopened in the midst of the pandemic (in the first gap in the circulation of people and reopening of the spaces), with the exhibition VIX – Estórias Capixabas, bringing together two artists from the collection, Dionísio Del Santo and Elpídio Malaquias, with contemporary artists from Espírito Santo and outside the state.
The pandemic was a very fragile time for the spaces. And in 2022, when I took over as Director, the instability caused by the pandemic contributed to the distancing of the public from the Museum, and all of its potential in its new post-renovation configuration had not yet been activated. The challenge I personally took on was – and has been – to move MAES forward and expand its activities with the local cultural scene, in addition to articulating with other institutions of national representation.
MAES will be 27 years old in December 2025. Its initial mission of being the state's great museum was designed between 1980 and 1990 by the critic and curator – also from Cachoeiro de Itapemirim – Paulo Herkenhoff, in partnership with the management of the State Department of Culture (DEC) at the time. The demand transformed MAES into a facility for interlocution with large “box office” exhibitions that toured nationally through the country's capitals – exhibitions that were formatted to occupy the exhibition spaces here at the Museum.
Over time, the Museum has disassociated itself from these exhibition packages and, especially since its entry as a line of funding to compose the agenda, through the Funcultura Calls in 2016, it has significantly strengthened its activities and thinking with the new local artistic production. This change is the breath of fresh air that we are now articulating with my management. There are three exhibitions selected by the Call, but other fronts have been demarcated from 2022 onwards, such as the opening of a permanent exhibition room for the collection and the activation of the library, in addition to institutional partnerships, both with agents from Espírito Santo and other states and important in the national and international contemporary art scene.
The Acervo em Diálogo program, in the permanent exhibition room, brings together curatorial selections from our collections with other collections and artists, as has already happened with the State Public Archive, the Galeria de Arte Espaço Universitário – UFES and even with the Grupo de Experimentação Sonora da UFES. Exhibiting the collection in a systematic way seems to me to be an opportunity not only to review, but also to update the thinking and perspectives of our collection and the Museum itself.
Among the interinstitutional partnerships, we can highlight the unprecedented exhibition by Associação Cultural Videobrasil, in 2022, REVIRAVOLTA, which took place at MAES and Galeria Homero Massena simultaneously. We also had the retrospective of the leading video artist Éder Santos, in 2023, in addition to the traveling 35th São Paulo Biennial, Coreografias do Impossível, also extending to Palácio Anchieta, in 2024, and the exhibition Favela é Giro, by Museu das Favelas, in 2024. All of these reinforce the institutional role of the Museum at a national level – we not only host the exhibitions, but we also think and produce together, activating the scene and professionals in the area in Espírito Santo. We can also highlight the role of MAES in the coordination of the VIII International Seminar Arte!Brasileiros, for the first time outside the State of São Paulo.
Furthermore, regarding the collection, our focus and revisits of the collections have also driven us to incorporate new works over the past three years: at least 30 new works and artists have entered our collection. We recently launched an acquisition program that had been in the works since 2022, when I joined: the Diálogo com Acervo (Dictionary with the Collection) Call for Proposals seeks to look inward and propose connections with contemporary national art. In this first edition, the curatorial proposal focuses on an artist from our collection, Nice Avanza. And, as such, it is 100% directed at black and indigenous artists – a direct inclusion of ten artists, which has proven to be fundamental in the history of MAES and in the attempt to restore and pluralize the collection. The collection has been being built since the Museum opened, and today has more than 600 works, and has five main collections: Dionísio Del Santo, Nice Avanza, Elpídio Malaquias, Raphael Samú and Maurício Salgueiro. Other artists and works orbit and make up the collection as a whole.
We can also highlight another activity that we have been promoting within the Museum, with the music scene. The MAES TONS program brings together the production of visual arts and music, and also brings together and creates dialogues between audiences. We have already had three editions with curatorial contributions from the Espírito Santo Music College (FAMES) and the Youth Reference Centers (CRJs).
ARTE!✱ – Tell us a little about MAES’s trajectory…
MAES opened in 1998 with an exhibition dedicated to the career and production of Dionísio Del Santo, recognized as one of the fundamental names of Brazilian modernism. Dionísio was an artist who meticulously used graphic techniques, as well as dedicated to painting, investing in geometric precision in his compositions. Born in Colatina, here in Espírito Santo, he lived and produced in Rio de Janeiro, but was always identified as an artist from Espírito Santo.
There is also a curious and very interesting detail: he was the one who helped with the silkscreen printing of Coca-Cola bottles in the project Insertions into Ideological Circuits, by Cildo Meireles. Despite working with traditional languages, Dionísio also contributed to a historical moment in experimental art. Considered by many to be a concrete artist, Dionísio, however, did not see himself that way.
I believe it is very symbolic that the Dionísio exhibition marked the beginning of the Museum, the result of long negotiations and exchanges with the Department of Culture, as we can see in some documents and manuscripts in the MAES archives. Dionísio passed away shortly after the opening of the exhibition and did not even participate in the inauguration event. From that moment on, the MAES was renamed the Dionísio Del Santo Museum of Art of Espírito Santo, in his honor. It was also the beginning of our collection, with the incorporation of works after the exhibition. We usually say that the MAES collection begins with Dionísio.
ARTE!✱ – Today, who are the artists from the State to be exhibited at MAES?
In all these years of operation, MAES has produced around 120 exhibitions. During our management alone, as of 2022, there have been more than 20 shows. When we consider this history over time, we see that important artists from the Espírito Santo circuit have passed through here: as already mentioned, Dionísio Del Santo (1998), the Nice Avanza retrospective exhibition in 2000 (which deserves a parenthesis – since 2019 I have dedicated myself to revisiting and reproposing Nice's work discursively, and we will hold this exhibition 25 years after the last one held at the Museum).
We can also highlight Meditações Extravagantes (2012), by the artist Nenna from Espírito Santo, now based in Paris. This exhibition, for example, took up space from the sidewalk of the Museum to the entire exhibition area and extended to the Galeria Homero Massena – a strategy that we have repeated repeatedly.
With the inclusion of MAES in the funding lines of the Funcultura Visual Arts Call, the Museum began to monitor local contemporary artistic production more closely, since the calls are aimed at applicants residing in the state. The projects are selected based on exhibition arrangements adapted to the new space after the renovation: spacious, lit by natural light, with windows that allow for negotiations with the urban landscape surrounding the building (a building that will now be 2025 years old in 100).
The projects receive resources from the State Culture Fund (Funcultura), currently with a transfer of R$150 thousand – double the amount spent at the beginning of the administration, in 2019. This increase follows inflation and the value of services in the market, but also reflects the demands of professionals in the artistic class and our attention in monitoring the development of each exhibition.
Our expectation with the three annual exhibitions selected is that the Museum will expand its connection with new artistic production, as well as be a stage for the development of research by artists with longer careers and reflections on their careers. Currently, the different generations of artistic production from Espírito Santo have come together at MAES.
It is important to remember that, among Secult's notices, the one for occupying spaces (MAES and GHM) was one of the first to have reserved places for black and indigenous people, in 2021 – which directly reflects on production, exhibitions and our audience.
ARTE!✱ – So, in this sense, focusing on exhibitions by artists from the State, could you list some of them?
From 2022 to date, there have been seven exhibitions designed especially for MAES and selected through the Public Notice. By the end of 2026, we will have seven more. In general, the exhibitions have explored the artists' trajectories, reflecting on their processes and research, based on a spatial elaboration of the works from new perspectives.
In 2023, we had ANTICORPOS, by Luciano Feijão and Juliana Pessoa – two drawing artists who develop restructurings on the representation of bodies, considering understandings of gender and raciality. Also in 2023, the exhibition Sete Caminhos, by Rafael Segatto, in partnership with Welington Santos and Renan Bono, articulated an expanded relationship between MAES and Quintal Bantu – a space for quilombola communities, resistance and artistic encounters at the top of Fonte Grande (a region surrounding the Museum). The exhibition featured installation works handling elements of the marine landscape, paintings, sound works and the provocation of walking through the city center, tracing seven paths and awakening other perceptions.
In the same year, Descarrilho brought together nine artists (Alessa Felix & Jessica Sampaio, Filipe Borba, Jaíne Muniz, Jessica Maria, Maria Menezes, Thiago Sobreiro and Yurie Yaginuma), curated by Clara Pignaton, in an artistic residency along the Vitória–Minas railway, reworking narratives about mining exploration and the transit between the two states.
Following this timeline, we also highlight FIAR, by Rick Rodrigues (2023); The Tenant, by Júlio Tigre (2024); The Persistence of the Word, by Fernando Augusto (2024); and Abyssal Skin, by Marcos Martins (2025).
ARTE!✱ – Today you have been working and circulating in several areas of art; how do you understand these relationships?
The path I have taken in the arts crosses my work as an artist, manager and curator. All of these activities occur in parallel, but with intersections. In almost twenty years of career, my artistic work has been the basis and the means by which I reach other spaces. Being the “everything artist”, in an expansion of the “etc.” artist, coined by Ricardo Basbaum, has made me understand the exercise of artistic practice beyond the conception of a work, but as a set of multiple actions.
In 2023, I organized an exhibition to celebrate the 15th anniversary of my production: FOR A CRISIS OF IMAGE, which took place at the Galeria de Arte Espaço Universitário (GAEU), at UFES. The exhibition presented four works developed between 2017 and 2023 and reflected on the relationship between image, culture and identity, elaborating on the ways in which the image influences the construction of social imaginaries and how it can support or oppose power structures.
Since 2015, I have been working on an ongoing project called Oretratista. In 2024, I launched the photography book and film LARGO, the result of an action I undertook in Praça Costa Pereira, in downtown Vitória, with a photography studio set up, open to anyone who wanted to be portrayed.
I recently participated in a large-scale group exhibition, Afro-Brazilianity (2025), at the art space of the Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV Arte, Rio de Janeiro), curated by Paulo Herkenhoff and João Victor Guimarães. The exhibition aims to encompass and relate the historical production of Afro-Brazilian art.
The curatorial activities I have undertaken within the management of the Secretariat of Culture – such as the proposals at Galeria Homero Massena and, currently, at MAES – and other opportunities have also expanded. I would like to highlight, for example, having been responsible for the curatorial proposal and implementation of the sculpture park at Parque Cultural Casa do Governador (2021–2023), in Vila Velha, under shared management by Secult and the Secretariat of Government of Espírito Santo.
For these curatorial initiatives, I can also point out the participation in the curation of New Acquisitions for the Banco do Nordeste Collection (2023), currently on tour with the exhibition Nordeste Expandido, which has circulated through all the capitals of the region and will arrive in Vitória in 2026.
Furthermore, the curatorship of the exhibition Transitar o Tempo (2024-2025), with co-curatorship by Clara Pignaton, at the invitation of Museu Vale. This exhibition brings together thirty artists from Espírito Santo from different generations, with attention to traditional knowledge and practices, artists who are not necessarily included in the art system and artists from other languages, such as music and dance. It is an exhibition that brings attention back to ourselves and, above all, to stories that are untold.
Finally, I also highlight the opportunity to contribute to the VIII International Seminar Arte!Brasileiros – Counter-Hegemonic Narratives, held for the first time outside São Paulo, here in Vitória.
I say all this to organize my understanding of being in transit, in a certain way, between the different places of art, and which allow us to constantly exercise creation and thought. ✱
