SAO PAULO.- Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel presents O homem nu [The naked man], the first comprehensive exhibition of Efrain Almeida’s work at the gallery since his passing. Bringing together works produced between 1995 and 2024, the exhibition offers a broad overview of his career and considers his practice through the relationships between the body, spirituality, and desire. Born in Boa Viagem, Cear, the artist developed a body of work deeply informed by the materials, craftsmanship, and cultural traditions of the Cariri region, working across sculpture, installation, painting, embroidery, and watercolor. Spanning nearly three decades, his practice brought together distinct geographies, beliefs, identities, and material traditions through a visual language in which wood, fabric, bronze, and paper become supports for intimate, resonant forms.
The exhibition centers on Almeida’s sculptures, alongside watercolors, oil paintings, and embroidered works. Recurring motifs include human bodies and fragments, garments, self-portraits, and animals native to northeastern Brazil, particularly birds. Detached from the body, articles of clothing become traces of absence, while repeated depictions of the artist introduce a sustained engagement with self-representation. In O Outsider (2017), an embroidered self-portrait appears on a translucent silk shirt, whose transparency and apparent weightlessness reinforce a recurring sense of transience. Throughout the exhibition, religious imagery, bodily experience, and everyday forms remain closely intertwined.
A recurring reference in Almeida’s work is the tradition of ex-votos, devotional offerings associated with healing, gratitude, and the vulnerable body. Their economy of means and directness of expression resonate throughout the exhibition, where motifs of offering, care, and fragility recur across different bodies of work. A similar attention extends to his representations of animals, rendered with close observation and remarkable delicacy while often appearing displaced within the architectural space. Among them, Lzaro (2005), a wooden sculpture of a dog extending its tongue toward the gallery wall, alludes to the biblical figure of Lazarus, the leper and beggar whose wounds were tended only by dogs.
The exhibition features a text by Mrcia Fortes.
