RIO DE JANEIRO.- Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel presents Como funcionam os vulcões, a group exhibition inaugurating Carpintaria’s 2026 exhibition program. Opening February 10 in Rio de Janeiro, the exhibition brings together works by Amélia Toledo, Arthur Chaves, Barrão, Cerith Wyn Evans, Ernesto Neto, Iran do Espírito Santo, Ivens Machado, Janaina Wagner, Leda Catunda, Rivane Neuenschwander & Cao Guimarães, Rodrigo Cass, Rodrigo Matheus, Tiago Carneiro da Cunha, Tunga, Valeska Soares, and Yuli Yamagata, curated by Fernanda Lopes.
Conceived in dialogue with the arrival of Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, Como funcionam os vulcões takes the image of the volcano as a metaphor for a complex cultural formation. Rather than a visible or immediate phenomenon, it evokes processes that unfold over time, accumulating pressures, desires, conflicts, and fantasies until they reach a point of release. In this sense, the exhibition proposes Carnival not as spectacle alone, but as the manifestation of a long gestational process shaped by social, material, and symbolic forces.
Moving across sculpture, installation, drawing, video, and mixed media, the exhibition emphasizes how meaning is produced through duration and material persistence.The works presented engage with dynamics of accumulation, transformation, and emergence. Across different generations and artistic positions, the exhibition brings together practices attentive to states of latency and eruption, suspension and excess. Materials are gathered, layered, stretched, compressed, or set into motion, registering tensions between control and unpredictability, structure and instability. The encounter with the works unfolds between wonder and strain, between what is staged and what remains dormant.
Moving across sculpture, installation, drawing, video and painting, the exhibition emphasizes how meaning is produced through duration and material persistence. Forms suggest prolonged processes of making and unmaking, while spatial arrangements foreground thresholds—between interior and exterior, containment and overflow, anticipation and release. These works do not seek to illustrate a social or natural phenomenon, but to operate within analogous conditions of pressure and transformation.
