Galeria Fortes Vilaça is pleased to present new works by Mauro Piva. In this exhibition, consisting entirely of watercolors, Piva abandons the human figure without, however, letting go of the idea of the portrait and the investigation of gesture and pose.

The show is composed of watercolors on paper, organized in two groups. The first is made up of drawings of flowers and plants. In the watercolors Madame and Banhista [Bather], the title characters refer to works by important names in the history of art: Madame Recamier by Jacques Lois David and The Bather by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. The classical poses inspire the shapes and curves of the roses depicted as well as their orientation in space.

In 7 ervas [7 Herbs], Piva establishes an ambiguous relation with art genres such as still-life and portrait. Bearing magical connotations in Brazilian culture, these plants appear in a group as in a still-life, with textures and excesses, but also in individual “portraits” where the symbolism of each herb is explored in a more latent way.

The day-to-day life of the artist’s studio inspired another series of “self-portraits”: watercolors that represent a pencil, pen or a blank sheet of paper, seen from a frontal and immediate point of view. In the twenty watercolors that compose Auto-retrato como lápis apontado [Self-Portrait like a Sharpened Pencil], the artist expresses the passage of time and the empirical character of his own daily practice.