Exhibition "The Shells of the Moon (Couple Pieces for Cida)"

A Quadra presents The moon's shells (shards for Cida), third solo exhibition of Matheus Chiaratti in the gallery, curated by Luis Perez-Oramas.

Bringing together a unique collection of paintings, sculptures, photographs, and textile works, the exhibition expands on issues that permeate the artist's research, marked by the convergence of literature, memory, and art history. In his practice, intimate narratives and cultural references are constantly rearticulated to give form to images that inhabit an ambiguous zone between document and fiction, desire and recollection.

The moon shells (Cadouços para Cida) also marks the third interaction in a collaboration between Chiaratti and Pérez-Oramas, which began in 2021 on the artist's podcast, Pivote, and led, in 2022, to the publication of the book "Balada para Joey Stefano," an unpublished poem by Pérez-Oramas accompanied by plastic interventions and drawings by Chiaratti (São Paulo: Quadra/Ikrek, 2022). The moon shells will continue in a second exhibition project to be held at the Galería Carmen Araujo in Caracas, Venezuela. The encounter between artist and curator resonates with a shared interest in forms of poetic imagination capable of challenging the boundaries between memory, image, and narrative.

The exhibition constructs a universe traversed by relationships between nature, eroticism, tragedy, affective archaeology, childhood, and poetry. The title arises from an unexpected encounter between a photograph of the artist's great-aunt, Cida, and the figure of Marilyn Monroe—an association that triggers an investigation into heritage, projection, and imagination. From this gesture, familiar characters, remaining objects, and fragmentary memories become starting points for the elaboration of new visual narratives.

Among the works presented, the paintings from the Cadouço series stand out—an archaic Portuguese word that can be understood as a hiding place. Organized as fragments of a visual diary, the works articulate portraits, landscapes, plant elements, texts, and images found in compositions that operate as paths of memory and desire. The canvases function as spaces of narrative condensation, where different times, characters, and references coexist in constant displacement.

The exhibition also incorporates sculptures and installations constructed from inherited objects and household materials. Fabrics and clothing are remade through procedures involving cutting, multiplying, and reinterpreting familiar vestiges that, when reconfigured by the artist, simultaneously function as affective documents and fictional constructions. In these works, the home environment emerges as a space of transmission, absence, and fabulation, where intimate memories find collective resonances.

The photographs throughout the exhibition reinforce this atmosphere of suspension. Gardens, interiors, and everyday objects appear as images from an imprecise time, situated between memory, dream, and apparition. More than illustrating narratives, they broaden the sensitive field of the exhibition, proposing an experience marked by the coexistence of the intimate and the enigmatic. By bringing together different media and temporalities, "The Shells of the Moon" highlights one of the central aspects of Matheus Chiaratti's research: the ability to transform fragments of life into open poetic constructions, in which memory, desire, and imagination remain in constant negotiation.