Meia meia

To understand an exhibition as an exercise in listening, an encounter, a pretext rather than a text. To understand the exhibition space as a scene—in the theatrical sense of the word—where we fine-tune our hearing, open ourselves to interaction with other bodies, present or absent. The exhibition space is strange by nature. In it, a certain perception of presence coincides with an irrepressible, one might say existential, solitude. This is because the exhibition space amplifies everything: the tangible, the visible, the incorporeal, and the atmospheric.

Meia meia, a glorious and graceful title, expresses an impromptu encounter between two artists from distinct generations and traditions who seem to have always known each other. Dialogue—a relational device as rare as it is precious in our times—is fluid, challenging, and vibrant. That is why this encounter feels all the more moving.

In Manuella Silveira’s paintings, immanent yet ambiguous materiality draws the eye into a haptic engagement close to the surface—a kind of tactile, gliding scrutiny. The painting vibrates not only chromatically, but also texturally: incisions, minuscule bas-reliefs, upside-down quasi-figures, isolated fragments of one body recombined to form another: hybrid, playful, absurd. Wandering metamorphoses bearing names that are at times metonymic, at times performative: Botadeira, Queda de Braço, Fujona…

In Vasco Futscher’s sculptures—almost-paintings, or paintings that conquer space hovering between plinth and wall, between the construction arts and the decorative arts, between brutalism and grace, the folkloric and the minimal, modernism and the vernacular, we encounter an imperfect geometry where color adheres to form as much as it sets rhythm—the tempo of the gaze, the desire of the hand. These works exist in a space freed from disciplinary constraints and, as such, seem to float: united by a constructive logic, some resonate more with (the history of) painting, while others evoke the experience of architecture, the lived reality of urban space.

This is an exhibition—or rather, an experience—that gives the body back to us. An exhibition-resonance, composed of echoes and references, a space of potential, ready for encounter.