Boca a Boca

Held on May 31, 2025 at FONTE , the independent residency and studio space in São Paulo, the group exhibition boca a boca brought together six cis women and non-binary artists— Isabelle Passos, Heloisa Franco, Patricia Baik, Lui Trindade, Luiza Zaroni and Jade Marra —in an ode to the desire to merge with one’s beloved and to the longing for loves past.

Below, the curatorial text, translated from Portuguese, and some photos of the show.

boca a boca

From the charchoals on paper by Isabelle Passos, who wields with baroque mastery the distance between the blackness and light to gaze closely at skin dermis mucosa; to Heloisa Franco’s heavy metal compositions, with brushstrokes wrought through micro-grinders and solvent – set in sharp contrast to the semi-angelic delicay of Patrícia Baik’s painted silk traced with feather-light strokes; to Jade Marra’s surreal cartographies, whose acrylics materialise symbols of presence and absence, blending dream and wakefulness, the physical and the sensuous; to Lui Trindade, whose latex-based objects meditate on the undoing of fundamental bodily binaries: inside-outside, living-dead, alluring-repulsive; to the pseudo-naïf gestures of Luiza Zaroni’s portraits, paintings-drawings in which she sometimes of speaks of herself, sometimes of faces imagined between cotton and pigment; boca a boca (mouth to mouth) gathers a slice of production that speaks above all of the yearning to overcome dichotomies – regarding oneself, the other, or nobody in particular, for the now, for what once was, and for what may yet be, alongside the many other yearnings born from this act of amalgamation:

the yearning for the subtle and casual brushing of your little finger slipping inside the sleeve of my shirt as someone who enters my body delicately and touches my spirit;

for the residual warmth of your body on my sheets right after waking up;

for the vivid memories of the scent of dirt flowers and dishes and the landscape from the last trip we managed to take together;

for the textures of every fold of your skin – soft, rough, thick, thin, always delectable;

for the laughter, the slangs and the microexpressions I absorbed from watching her so closely, and in her seeing myself as well;

for the heat I feel behind my left breast when I hear people speak of you;

for my fingers slowly running through your hair;

for the dreams of would-be eternity ripped through and disfigured by the eruption of an abyss of intentions, desires and ghosts which insists violently on being insurmountable in spite of, or exactly because of, the degree of mutual care and selflessness we have cultivated since the first moment our smiles met and we concluded instinctively that we could never conceive of a happiness that implies the erasure of who the other is;

for the scent of your mouth, opium.