Exhibition "The Naked Man", by Efrain Almeida

A Forts D'Aloia & Gabriel presents the naked man, the first panoramic exhibition of the work of Efrain Almeida (1964 – 2024) in the gallery since his passing. Bringing together works produced between 1995 and 2024, the exhibition offers a broad view of his trajectory and proposes an interpretation of his production based on the relationships between body, spirituality, and desire. Born in Boa Viagem, Ceará, the artist developed a body of work deeply marked by the materials, knowledge, and cultural traditions of the Cariri region, moving between sculpture, installation, painting, embroidery, and watercolor. Over almost three decades, he articulated different geographies, beliefs, identities, and material traditions through a visual language in which wood, fabric, bronze, and paper become supports for experiences that are simultaneously intimate and universal.

The exhibition focuses on Almeida's sculptures, alongside watercolors, oil paintings, and embroideries. Recurring motifs include bodies and body fragments, clothing, self-portraits, and native animals of Northeast Brazil, especially birds. In his work, references to Catholic imagery coexist with the sensuality of the nude body, which acquires both erotic and sacred dimensions. In *The Outsider* (2017), an embroidered self-portrait emerges on a translucent silk shirt, whose transparency and apparent lightness reinforce a recurring sense of transience, where the face appears as an emblem on a fluttering support.

Although deeply rooted in the experiences, landscapes, and traditions of the interior of Ceará, Almeida's work is never restricted to autobiographical or regional records. His production transforms local references into images capable of evoking universal experiences, making memory, spirituality, the fragility of the body, and desire shared issues. This passage between the intimate and the collective, between the local and the universal, finds a parallel in the very scale of his sculptures: executed with remarkable precision and frequently in small dimensions, they establish an expansive relationship with the exhibition space, reorganizing the perception of the environment and demanding attentive approach from the viewer. A similar attention extends to the representations of animals, observed with delicacy and frequently presented in a displaced manner within the architecture. Among them, Lázaro (2005), a wooden sculpture of a dog extending its tongue towards the gallery wall, references the biblical figure of the beggar whose wounds were licked only by dogs, condensing in a single gesture dimensions of care, abandonment, and tenderness that permeate all of the artist's work.

The exhibition unfolds as an occupation at house 29, a space for special projects at the Sardenberg gallery.

Service
Exhibition | the naked man
From August 22th to October 24th
Tuesday to Friday from 10am to 19pm, Saturday from 10am to 18pm