RIO DE JANEIRO.- A Gentil Carioca announces Desde sempre o mar (Since always the sea), a solo exhibition by artist Mariana Rocha in building 17 of A Gentil Carioca Rio de Janeiro. Inspired by the vastness of the sea and the mysteries of microscopic life, Rocha dives into a universe where the boundaries between science, myth and art dissolve. The show brings together new paintings that move between figuration and abstraction, evoking organic forms such as roots, eyelashes, arms and membranes — elements that unfold as symbols of the origin and continuity of life.
In the words of art historian and curator Renato Menezes, who wrote the show's introductory text, “Mariana Rocha cheats the scale, and thus painting itself seems to become, to the artist, a way of re-equating the essential minimums of life. Particle and whole, cell and organism, drop and ocean renegotiate their orders of magnitude right in front of our eyes. It’s no accident that her research is focused on the sea: it was there, in the immense and deep vastness, that the simplest forms of life started to appear. But as always, the minimum is also the maximum: baroque, dramatic, mysterious and vibrant, her painting metabolizes the world in order to see, from its most intimate and obscure part, what of the most superficial it can reveal.”
The exhibition is open until August 9th, 2025.
The gallery is also presenting SPECTRUM, Siwaju's solo exhibition at Building 11 of A Gentil Carioca in Rio de Janeiro. The artist's sculptural practice investigates the relationship between time and different ecologies. By reusing pieces of steel — donated, collected and recycled during frequent visits to recycling centres — her works establish a direct link with Brazilian three-dimensional thinking. Her sculptures articulate matter and Cosmos, visible and invisible energies, object and surroundings, sculptural body and space, organising themselves in a spiral temporality, in a constant flow of expansion and retrospection, which activates Afro-diasporic knowledge.
“Interconnected ‘families of works’ unfold in the space, each with its own grammar and gestures, but all traversed by the desire to create zones of interference where past and future, beauty and freedom coexist in creative tension. Like a twenty-first century blacksmith, Siwaju doesn’t shape the steel, but negotiates with its spectres: welded joints appear like stitches between times, the polished surfaces give back disobedient reflections, the whispers of matter, the artist suggests, make us break free from industrial logic.” — points out curator Nathalia Grilo, author of the introductory text for the exhibition, which will run until August 9th, 2025.
