TURIN.- Mazzoleni presents Tracing Thought. 2002–2025, the first solo exhibition in Turin by Iran do Espírito Santo.

The exhibition retraces over twenty years of the Brazilian artist’s career and features new site- specific works conceived specifically for the show. It unfolds in the grand rooms of the gallery’s main floor, creating an intimate dialogue with the architecture.

An internationally renowned artist with works held in major collections including MAXXI in Rome, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Espírito Santo conceived the Turin exhibition inspired by the architectural qualities of the gallery space. These characteristics allowed him to reflect on his practice over the past two decades, focusing on two key concepts at the heart of his research: light and scale.

The symbolic path of Tracing Thought opens poignantly with Untitled (Key Hole) (2002), a work the artist chose to exhibit after seeing the gallery’s structure and its sequence of rooms aligned along a central axis. The corridor, Espírito Santo explains, suggests “an almost cinematic visual experience” that guides the viewers gaze and interacts with the artworks in each room. From this piece, the conceptual threads that run throughout the exhibition emerge.

The theme of scale is explored both semantically and physically: the scale of objects, proportion, and also chromatic scale, as in Switch (2025). This new site-specific wall painting belongs to one of the artist’s most iconic and globally recognised series. Composed of 56 shades of grey, Espírito Santo explains:

The wall pieces (drawings and paintings) play an important role in my production. To me, wall pieces are “resistance pieces”, that are there, despite our commodity-obsessed society. All this is to say that the ephemerality of it becomes part of the condition of having it done, and maybe adds another poetic layer, like an art of time as well as space.

Scale, understood as a unit of measure and proportion, is also magnified in two extraordinary new works produced specifically for this exhibition: Metro and Compasso (Meter and Compass). As is often the case in Espírito Santo’s work, both are built exactly like their real-life counterparts, but on a monumental scale; the compass stands 1.80 metres tall. Here, the artist reflects on the aura and function of the object, transforming it into a metaphor for the human condition: objects caught between the world of ideas (the geometric and measuring principles they replicate in scale) and reality, the desire to become functional things.

The exhibition is completed by historical works such as Globe (2011) (ethereal white marble sculptures), Reflexive Windows 10 (2020) (black granite that evokes the reflections of windows at night); and the Curtains series (2025), presented in a new vertical version. These meticulous graphite drawings, inspired by the folds of fabric, are composed of intricately drawn lines repeated at one-millimetre intervals. These lines trace rhythms of scale and proportion that transform the flatness of the page, offering a conceptual meditation on the tension between lightness and weight, between the world of ideas and the material world — subtle variations that shift perception, for the artist as much as the viewer.

I often say that an image becoming a work functions like a recurring dream, an intrusive thought that demands to be interpreted. An object you start seeing everywhere, that ‘speaks to you,’ capturing your attention. Drawing plays an important role in this process: it is the beginning of materiality, or perhaps what comes before it. I draw constantly, out of both psychological and physical necessity. But when I draw ‘seriously,’ with a clear purpose, it’s like building something that has mass, yet is also partially freed from the tyranny of physics. Iran do Espírito Santo

On the occasion of the exhibition, a catalogue will be published featuring a critical text by Jacopo Crivelli Visconti. The volume will present the works shown in the Turin exhibition as well as those in the subsequent show at Mazzoleni Milan, running from January 21 to March 28, 2026.

Further documenting the exhibition process, in Spring 2025, Iran do Espírito Santo welcomed the Mazzoleni team into his home in São Paulo. Surrounded by the elegant, meticulously composed atmosphere of his living space, and the land he has been actively reforesting over the past years, the artist opened the doors of his studio, offering a rare glimpse into his creative process and sharing personal reflections on his practice. This visit culminated in a video made for Mazzoleni by film maker Flora Del Debbio, which has since been selected for international contemporary film festival Artecinema, returning for its 30th edition in Naples from 9 to 12 October 2025.

Iran do Espírito Santo was born in Mococa, Brazil in 1963. Often working on an ambitious scale, he wryly subverts the Minimalist tradition through his abstracted sculptures of familiar everyday objects made strange by their disorientating size and incongruous materials, such as granite, glass, steel, copper or stone. These sculptural works strip away all extraneous detail, emphasizing the essential line and form of the object. This rigorous simplicity carries through to his demanding wall drawings in paint and sgraffito that transform the entire gallery through subtle gradations of tone and hypnotic repetition of pattern but require many weeks to complete. It was a combination of these two aspects of his practice which comprised the artist’s first UK solo exhibition, at Ingleby Gallery during Edinburgh Art Festival 2010. In the past two decades, Iran do Espírito Santo has received much international acclaim and his works have been exhibited widely in museums and galleries worldwide, and are included in the collections of many prominent museums such as: the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, MAXXI, Rome, IMMA, Dublin and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. He has also made substantial contributions to the Venice Biennale (1999 and 2007), the Bienal de São Paulo (1987), and the Istanbul Biennial (2000). Recent exhibitions have included Reflexivos at Oi Futuro, Brazil (2019) and Chosen Memories - Contemporary Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift and Beyond, MoMA, USA (2023).