Galeria Fortes Vilaça is pleased to present new works by Mauro Piva. For his second solo exhibition in the gallery, the São Paulo artist has produced a new series of oil paintings. In these works, Piva reaffirms the relationship between body and space as a central theme in his iconography.

The paintings are peopled by figures that have previously appeared in his drawings. They are anonymous characters, without any individualizing characteristic, who subtly differ from each other through masculine and feminine anatomical features-wider shoulders and straight lines for the man, breasts and subtle curves for the woman. With this recurring "vocabulary," the artist gives continuity to his investigation into contemporary habits and persists in his development of a genealogy of desire.

However, while in the drawings narratives tell of the human condition in ample realistic settings, the compositions now appear more "focused," more reduced, revealing only fragments of bodies. These figures in detail appear against white or black backgrounds, like the infinite backdrop of a photographic studio. Referring to the language of cinematographic close-ups, the paintings exert an immediate fascination. The pictorial field becomes more concrete, harder and more aggressive.

"More erotic than lyrical, more acid than humorous, more tense than calm, Maura Piva's paintings are coherent developments of a production that has shown what an extensive and broken territory desire occupies in ordinary life." Such is the description of Moacir dos Anjos, curator and director of the MAMAM/Museu de Arte Moderna Aloísio Magalhães in Recife (Brazil), in a critical text on the artist's work, published in the first book about Piva, which will be launched concomitantly with the exhibition.

Last year Mauro Piva had a solo show in Belo Horizonte and participated in the group show Instinctive, curated by Mario Testino for the Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York.