NEW YORK, NY.- Affirmation Room brings together a constellation of artists whose work articulates vocabularies capable of accessing the intangible. Curated by Germano Dushá, the exhibition takes as its departure point the notion of cataphasis – derived from Greek kata (an intensifier conveying positive assertion) and phanai (to speak) – understood here not as a theological category but as a practice of affirming the spiritual through positive construction. The gallery becomes a field of inquiry into how the unseen might be given vibration, matter, and shape. Across different languages and temporalities, the works assembled here engage transcendence through geometry, gesture, materiality, and energetic composition. Form operates not as passive belief but as an active proposition, a means of making present that which resists definition.The exhibition anchors a multigenerational conversation spanning Brazilian Neo-Concretism to contemporary artists working across painting, sculpture, and installation. Emerging in Brazil in the late 1950s, the Neo-Concrete movement marked a shift away from the rationalism and objectivity of Concretism, embracing instead a more experiential, poetic, and sensorial approach to form. Rejecting the idea of the artwork as a self-contained, purely geometric object, Neo-Concrete artists emphasized the body, perception, and the viewer’s active participation. Their works became propositions – vehicles for sensation, emotion, and subjectivity. Foundational figures Lygia Pape, Sergio Camargo, and Amilcar de Castro appear in the exhibition alongside Rubem Valentim, whose emblematic signs synthesize geometric abstraction with Afro-Brazilian symbolism. Pape, Camargo, and de Castro’s industrial, idealistic sculptures – dynamically evoking squares, circles, and triangles – propose structures of order and perception that resonate directly with Valentim’s Emblemas (emblems), in which the same shapes ascend from a circuit, or mechanism, from which forces flow. If Neo-Concrete practices affirmed immaterial experiences through embodied encounter, Valentim’s project enacted a parallel but distinct mode of positive construction through the transmutation of inner matrices into form; in his 1976 manifesto, he stated, “creating my symbol-signs, I try to transform into visual language the enchanted, magical, probably mystical world that continuously flows within me.”

The exhibition’s twentieth-century artists are placed in direct dialogue with contemporary practitioners: Adriano Amaral, Laís Amaral, Lucas Arruda, Torkwase Dyson, Advânio Lessa, Wen Liu, Paulo Nazareth, Guan Xiao, and Leah Ke Yi Zheng. Arruda, for instance, presents a large vertical painting from the Deserto-Modelo series – a rare format seen only three times before in his production – that strongly connects with Valentim’s geometrical approach. With warm tones and a minimal, symbolic figuration, the work depicts blazing celestial spheres, the central one encapsulating a mystical downpour. At its base, an element resembling an architectural ornament reinforces both the spatial and allegorical dimension of the composition. Hovering between abstraction and representation, the work highlights entanglements between the cosmological and the concrete. On another side of the chromatic and meditative spectrum, Dyson’s Black Quiet 2 (Bird and Lava) (2024), reveals a dark geometric field in which faint lines and subtle chromatic shifts emerge from blackness to create a powerful diagram – its evocative shapes articulating ecological consciousness and spatial liberation.

From Afro-diasporic cosmologies to geometric patterns, from sacred reflections to abstract exercises, Affirmation Room’s artists share an investment in form as carriers of energy, of meaning, of presence. The works do not depict the ethereal so much as embody it, giving contour to forces that exceed the physical dimension. The exhibition thus becomes a resonance chamber, a conceptual space for attunement and invocation, a room of affirmations.