Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel presents a solo booth by Márcia Falcão at Frieze London 2026. The presentation advances the artist’s investigation of the body while positioning painting itself—its material density, chromatic construction, and capacity to make a figure cohere or dissolve—as both subject and method.
Born and raised in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, Falcão addresses the embodied social realities of women—particularly Black women—whose lives unfold in Brazil’s urban peripheries. Presented here for the first time, the new Camuflada [Camouflaged] series explores visibility and protection through painting itself. The figures occupy the canvas emphatically, yet fragmented anatomies, interrupted contours, and the merging of body and ground keep them partially concealed from the gaze. Protection arises not through disappearance, but through this resistance to complete legibility.
Falcão approaches flesh through and with paint, rather than treating technique as a neutral means of depiction. A single earth-toned pigment provides the chromatic ground, modulated into violets and blues, dense shadows and flashes of light. Across opaque and translucent passages, pigment gathers, thins, stains, and is dragged across the canvas, making the surface both image and record of its construction. Light emerges from within this material field, catching a contour or limb before withdrawing into shadow. The result is a turbulent pictorial space in which flesh, light, and background exchange properties, allowing the material substance of painting to carry conceptual and symbolic weight.
The series title refers to the “dazzle camouflage” applied to Royal Navy vessels during the First World War: fractured geometric patterns intended not to hide the ships, but to frustrate estimates of their distance, direction, and speed. Falcão translates this optical principle into a politics of bodily visibility. The figure remains insistently present, while its boundaries, position, and movement elude fixity. Camouflage thus becomes an active strategy rather than a retreat—a provisional defense within exposure, and a means by which the represented bodies retain agency over the terms on which they appear.
The Frieze presentation follows Falcão’s solo presentation of five large-scale paintings at the 36th Bienal de São Paulo – Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice (2025). Camuflada carries this research on the body and the limits of figuration into a more complex negotiation between appearance, concealment, vulnerability, and self-protection.
