The exhibition Almir Mavignier — acaso determinado, based on a critical reading by Luiz Armando Bagolin, presents a journey in which art, perception and existence meet. The exhibition is based on the decisive experience of the painting studio created in 1946 at the National Psychiatric Center of Engenho de Dentro, based on the meeting between Almir Mavignier and Nise da Silveira. There, painting emerged as a space for reception, expression and interior reorganization for artists such as Emygdio de Barros, Raphael Domingues, Carlos Pertuis, Fernando Diniz and Isaac Liberato.

This initial core reveals an essential dimension of the exhibition: art as a vital necessity. In the studio, Mavignier acted without interfering with the form of the works, respecting the specific strength of each image. The works produced in that context were not born of a previous aesthetic program, but of an internal urgency, of an order constructed by the very act of seeing, feeling and painting.

Alongside these works, the exhibition follows Mavignier’s trajectory towards the construction of a rigorous and investigative language. His time in Europe, especially the Ulm School, deepened his research on color, grid, repetition, system, and perception. In dot paintings, permutations, posters, and subsequent series, the artist transforms the image into a field of visual experimentation, where small variations produce movement, vibration, and surprise.

The exhibition thus brings together two distinct paths: on the one hand, the image that is born from an intense subjective experience; on the other, the image constructed through rational systems, calculation, method, and variation. What unites these two universes is not a simple formal resemblance, but a common question: how does an image gain its own strength, beyond the direct will of its author?

Between the studio and the spiral, between intuition and the system, between gesture and rule, the exhibition reveals art as a form of knowledge and as a mode of existence. As Mavignier stated, “art is a solution to exist” – and it is precisely this vital dimension that runs through the entire exhibition.