Lúgubre Celestial

At the invitation of Bruno Alheiros, from the Rio-based Arrecife Galeria, I curated the exhibition Lúgubre Celestial, with the duo Gabriel Almeida and Letícia Lopes, whose practices converse both visually and—above all—on a semiotic or conceptual level, each bringing a distinct concern with the inner world of thoughts, dreams, reveries, interpretation, and divination. The exhibition opened on November 30, 2024. Below is the curatorial text.

Lúgubre Celestial

In the chiaroscuro where monstrosity is born and cortical hallucinations reign free, waking life yields the stage of consciousness to diverse phenomenic life. The pretense of faithfully predicting outside reality dissolves; with your eyes closed, all you can see is what lies behind them. The unconscious in an eigengrau-coloured canvas: like cloud pareidolia, we project onto nothingness only what we already carry with us. The dream is a mirror.

Lúgubre Celestial (Heavenly Lugubrious) promotes the natural encounter of two painters of the unconscious who, operating beyond the figurative-abstract binomial, present works that clearly state that the mode of expression most dear to them is the symbolic – form imbued with meaning projected by the mind. In painting as in delirium, what is seen is all there is.

While Letícia Lopes discovers, in the half-light of domesticity, skin-like velvet and the indocility of the wilderness, bringing human and animal closer together, Gabriel Almeida’s symbology at once congregate religious iconography and kitsch porcelain, conjuring sacro-memetic convergences. As above, so below.