NEW YORK, NY.- Efraín López is presenting You Need to Be Aggressive to Be a Sculptor, Really!, an exhibition featuring new works by Lyz Parayzo, a Brazilian-born artist based in Paris. This exhibition marks her first collaboration with the gallery and follows her participation in the 17th Lyon Biennale. Borrowed from Louise Bourgeois, the title captures the bold and uncompromising spirit of Parayzo’s sculptural practice—where the violence directed at her travesti body is transformed into both formal and political force. Her work critically reinterprets Brazilian modernist traditions through the lens of gender, identity, and dissent. Coming from a lineage of goldsmiths, Parayzo embodies an ancestral savoir-faire that informs her sculptural gestures and shapes her instinctive relationship with metal. On view from May 9 to June 21, 2025, the exhibition features new sculptures cast in earth, created from recycled metal in collaboration with artisans from the Medina of Marrakech during her artistic residency in Morocco, along with a series of lithographs produced in Paris.

I first met Lyz Parayzo six years ago in Paris, shortly after she had arrived from her native Rio de Janeiro to pursue a Masters degree at the prestigious École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. In the weeks leading up to this exhibition, we spoke often, reflecting on the role of art in the present moment. During a walk through the Place de la République, we spoke about how her work had taken on a new dimension in recent years, and about her past fears of growing complacent within the academic climate she had come to inhabit. Though not uncommon among artists, this anxiety held particular weight for her.

She reflected on her trajectory — how the original spirit of defiance that propelled her early performances in Brazil had been a direct confrontation with the repressive structures that permeated the country at the time. In France, this kind of urgency seemed to dissolve. There, her battles were waged within the art world itself — a space where she was confronted with the layered challenges of being a minority and a woman artist in a foreign land. She was compelled to devise new tactics to infiltrate structures of power, building a practice that could endure, that could translate her lived experience of violence and her pursuit of autonomy into a code legible within institutional frameworks — most notably through bellicose sculpture and installation. In a climate of intensifying legal discrimination across the globe, she once again felt the same sense of gravitas that had first compelled her to make art. In that recognition, she seemed to deliberately re-engage in the battle she had always been fighting. Many years later, now supported by institutional recognition and a matured aesthetic vocabulary, she appeared to have come to terms with her own forged capacity to navigate this world — even as her vulnerability, as a marginalized subject, becomes ever more palpable to herself.

This evolution is not only biographical, but embedded in the way her work meets the viewer. A lot of this show rests on an unspoken pact between spectator and artist. Aesthetics carry meaning — the semiotic field of art is one of the last enclaves of critical thought, because it is virtually inaccessible to bigots and small-time thinkers. Abstraction, insofar as it describes sensation rather than representation, is a language that informs our contemporary sensibilities without offending or alienating due to its perceived neutrality. The Brazilian Neo-concrete project that emerged in the late 1950’s rejected the purely rational and universal aims of the European concretists, borrowing its vernacular for objectives that were specific to the local context. In sculpture, as in other parts of the world —as with cinetism in France, and with Fluxus worldwide— this manifested in the elementary participation of the viewer in the activation of the work.

It is in this lineage that Lyz Parayzo’s oeuvre finds resonance, while also carving out a distinct path. Her practice clearly belongs to the Neo-concrete tradition in its relational aesthetics and phenomenological grounding, and yet her works communicate in opposite ways. Whereas Lygia Clark’s Bichos were built to be approachable and malleable, Lyz’s sculpture produces a double action: it invites and repels. It does this through the simulacra of danger, and in so doing increases the awareness of the spectator. Embedded in the language of violence is the potential for self- determination. Her Bixinhas — named after a colloquial term in Brazil used to refer to queer individuals — are small sculptures that repel through their sharp edges and serrated design, subverting the presumed docility often projected onto non normative bodies.

Metal is a material traditionally coded as hard and masculine. This is the impression that the artist received when she witnessed her uncles working at her grandfather’s workshop installed in the house where she grew up. In her own words: “What I didn’t know at the time was that watching metal plates being bent and cut from my childhood to adulthood by those rough men was, unknowingly, teaching me to become a sculptor.” From this material, she began crafting cutting objects that symbolically expressed her inner battles and served as protection against patriarchal systems of power.

It’s in this friction — between form and threat, invitation and resistance — that the exhibition finds its critical force. Shows like this are important, above all because they allow the space to be and to think at a time when that is more urgent than ever. It compels us to think of questions that were until recently central to mainstream culture in different ways. What if bodies were archives of past and future worlds?

What if visibility wasn’t the goal, but resonance or opacity? How do we think about the work when the social context is saturated with surveillance?

These questions gather weight as the exhibition unfolds. One room presents one of her latest works, Le Retour de Saturne, mimicking the form of a planet whose nebulous ring system is replaced with regular, angular protrusions that resemble gear teeth or serrations. Its central sphere was made using dinanderie — a medieval metalworking technique that transforms flat metal sheets into spherical shapes. Whereas the simplicity of its form as a planet suggests distance, the material reality of it —chain, metal— brings the experience closer. The totality suggested by the sphere is set in tension with the metal rods that penetrate it and hold it in dynamic equilibrium with the serrated ring. Mimicking the architecture of trauma, it functions like a charged axis around which meaning and memory revolve. The smaller sculptures, spread around it, resemble satellites, orbiting objects, or constellations, each embodying its own gravitational pull.

The process of creation — and the site of its making — are equally significant to the exhibition’s impact. This series was created from recycled metal in collaboration with artisans from the Medina of Marrakech during her artistic residency in Morocco last year. This period allowed for the artist to immerse herself in a culture that resonates with that of her native Brazil in their deeply syncretic manifestations. The Moroccan emphasis on handicraft and tactility resonated with her sculptural practice, and the sensory richness that characterises this sensibility is seen in the newly-found curvature in these new works: golden, iridescent, and brimming with talismanic agency. Their protective power is not projected outward through menace, but drawn inward — through the logic of blessing, ritual and presence. These same concerns are echoed in her lithographic practice, represented here by two prints. The geometric floor pattern of her apartment in Marrakech—typical of local architectural and decorative traditions—served as a starting point for translating her sculptural idiom into a two- dimensional, pictorial form. The result is an affective cartography that anchors the memory of her body and her sculptural gestures to this specific territory.

Taken together, the works on view create a space charged with dualities. The exhibition traces a liminal space between two worlds: the outward-facing, bellicose, saw-like objects and the inward-facing, psychic artifacts. The former are forged in aggression — a visceral response to malignant architectures of power — and speak to the fight for bodily autonomy. The latter are rooted in the spiritual, in the quiet urgency of self-preservation, and speak to the protection of the soul.

This internal tension finds expression in the very atmosphere of the exhibition. It extends to the space itself, where a soft lavender light invites heightened perception. Within this atmosphere, the gallery becomes a site for collective imagination—a place to envision new configurations of being, where dissident bodies not only survive but thrive, and to surrender to an imaginary that is both deliberately constructed and deeply felt. Beyond these walls lies an uncertain terrain, where the ambient pressure of instability threatens to harden into cynicism, and where marginalized voices are continually dulled, distorted, or erased. In this context, the exhibition does not offer resolution, but insists on the necessity of imagining otherwise — like Lyz Parayzo’s practice as a whole, it amounts to the contention that complacency is not an option.

- Julia Tavares Grünberg