"Cantaria" Exhibition by Daniel Jorge

A DM Mendes Wood is pleased to present Cantaria, first solo exhibition of Daniel Jorge in São Paulo. Occupying the warehouse in Barra Funda, the exhibition brings together previously unseen works including sculptures, wall reliefs, installations and performances, and is accompanied by a new essay by curator and researcher Carlos Quijon Jr.

The exhibition title refers to the stonemason's craft, the technical knowledge of carved stone, which the artist learned. The word also holds the meaning of song, the sound of ritual and work that accompanies those who carve. It is from this intersection of hand and voice, precision and improvisation, that Jorge's practice takes shape. In his works, the material does not arrive alone, but accompanied by the work, the exchanges, and the stories that brought it there.

Born in Recreio, in the interior of Minas Gerais, raised in Curumau, in the West Zone of Rio de Janeiro, and now based in Salvador, Jorge works with what these three geographical locations have given him. Soapstone, a dense and soft rock that served the Minas Gerais Baroque period, arrives at his studio through exchange relationships with workers and small communities in Minas Gerais. "Each stone carries a chain of bodies within the work," says the artist.

For Jorge, the work is about "testing how far the material can go, and letting it respond." The answer lies, for example, in the pigmentation process that the artist developed. The charcoal, produced in the studio from wood collected in the city and burned there, is both vehicle and reagent; the blue pigment is made from graphic waste acquired through exchanges with the city's printing companies. Mixed with the charcoal and deposited on the soapstone, the blue makes the quartzites that cross it apparent, and the surface gains brilliant points that no gesture could have planned. Pitch, the asphalt emulsion that paves roads and waterproofs the slabs of houses on the outskirts of the city, acts as a layer of deep black that pigments and adds a thin layer of skin over the stone.

The iron collected by the artist sometimes undergoes a natural oxidation process, and sometimes it is oxidized with salt, water, and vinegar—a technique that enslaved people fleeing the land used to darken their tools and camouflage them in the forest during their journeys to the quilombos (maroon settlements). Embedded in the carved stone, the iron points rise like towers, spears, and nails. They are not mere ornaments: they preserve the memory of the escape and organize the work, in what the artist calls "symbolic revenge," exercised through gesture.

On the stone, Jorge performs the gesture of scarification: cuts, incisions, scratches. His research brings together the many meanings of this gesture, from the bodily mark that, among peoples such as the Mursi, Yoruba, and Nuba, inscribes belonging on the skin, to the breaking of the seed coat so that it germinates, to the medical incision that vaccinates and heals. On the sculptural surfaces, the motif reappears in fields of perforations, ordered furrows, and protuberances. This is what leads the artist to keloids, the skin that insists on returning to its original plane: the matter that was previously subtracted is now agglutinated, creating small anthropomorphic reliefs in some of the pieces.

In the exhibition, the works hang from the ceiling, lean against the wall, and land directly on the floor. In Balanced Manumission (2024), stone spheres and iron chains are not attached to anything: they merely balance, the weight of one supporting that of the other. In Floating is surrendering your weight to the current (2026), a soapstone block pierced by large holes rests on the floor, surrounded by a chain bearing a seahorse at its end; the title teaches the gesture: floating is not effort, it is surrender. And in Orifice (2024), a gray, scarified stone is embedded in a U-shaped wall that organizes the path of the first room: it is as if the work becomes a host on the wall of the space, confusing us around the equation of matter that is lost between addition and subtraction, becoming part of it. The movement is repeated in several works in the show: the artist blurs the path that would allow us to say whether the form results from a subtraction or an addition of matter.

The exhibition culminates in the installation-performance *Condição de Assentamento* (2026), in which forty-nine soapstones are distributed across the floor, occupying an entire gallery room. Performed before the exhibition opening, the performance makes the artist's own work a way of occupying the space: Jorge divides the stones with wedges, pigments them with charcoal, pitch, and blue graphic residue, and scarifies them. Once the gesture is complete, the artist withdraws, and the stones remain as a constellation throughout the exhibition period.

For the artist, “the right to subjectivity, to displacement, to abstraction, to ambiguity—rights systematically co-opted from certain bodies in Brazil—are claimed here as the material infrastructure of the work, not as an agenda.” What is revealed in Cantaria is a practice sustained by elders, workers, and friendships, or, in Quijon's words, “an ecology that thrives on uneven ground.”