Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel is pleased to inaugurate its 2025 program in São Paulo with a solo exhibition by Lucia Laguna, A Propósito de Duas Janelas [Regarding Two Windows], her fourth show with the gallery.

Since she began painting, the window has functioned as Laguna’s point of view and as a guide for her compositional decisions: it operates both as a system for ordering the surface into squares and rectangles, destabilizing scale and creating new vistas within the frame.

These works, produced between this year and throughout 2024 and 2023, stand for a transitional moment in the artist’s investigations: Laguna has recently moved to a new studio, leaving the space where she worked and lived for over 40 years. This physical displacement also led to a formal and thematic transformation in her works, leading to the “two windows” in the show’s title. In paintings such as Paisagem nº 157 (2024), monochrome blocks and bands in neon shades of green, yellow, orange, red, and pink are new elements that expand her chromatic repertoire while sharpening the possibilities inherent in her practice. A dynamic of concealment and disclosure creates luminous erasures, presences that also hide. By cutting and crossing the surface, these geometric interventions of planes and lines de-hierarchize perspective, subverting proportions. Buildings and fragments of architecture are nestled within representations of luscious vegetation.

While anchored in figures, her works shift into abstract passages. The incisive diagonals, colorful surface blockages, resolute cuts, and cross-sections that characterize Laguna’s paintings reference built elements such as walls, power lines, fences, and houses, thus translating the palimpsestic nature of Rio de Janeiro’s urban fabric. The presence of this maze-like landscape imposes a fragmentary understanding to which the artist responds with observations that are sometimes micro, sometimes macroscopic. Through a gaze that scrutinizes and expands the surroundings, these compositions are deeply embedded in the environment and involved in the construction, reconstruction, and deconstruction of space.

The exhibition features an essay by critic and curator Diego Matos.

Special thanks to Claudia Moreira Salles and Dpot for the furniture in the show.