Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel and Quadra present Ana Cláudia Almeida & Tadáskía, an exhibition curated by Clarissa Diniz which simultaneously occupies both galleries in São Paulo with a selection of new works, including sculptures, paintings, drawings, wall reliefs, videos and photographs that explore material and conceptual connections between cosmology, memory and transformation. This is the first time that the artists have exhibited in Brazil since Almeida entered the MFA program at Yale and Tadáskía’s solo exhibition at MoMA. More than the similarities between the artists’ practices, the exhibition emphasizes the frictions and distances that appear between their work. In lieu of an approximation through identity, the terrain of meanings produced by difference.

In Diniz’s words: “The disparities in the works of Ana Cláudia Almeida & Tadáskía are not complementary. Their differences are not equivalent. Their works’ singularities precisely highlight the unknown that resists the presumed familiarity surrounding them today.”

Ana Cláudia Almeida’s material universe is established by manipulating paints, plastic, oil sticks, fabric and images. The fluttering aspect of her works on cloth, the cumulative, shifting character of her sculpture and the kaleidoscopic fragmentation of her large-scale paintings transpose and translate intangible memory into matter. This dimension is felt both in the surface of her pieces, as Almeida allows vestiges of previous gestures to remain in the finished form, and in a conceptual and symbolic manner. Made of intense superpositions of empty and full space, the abstraction that defines the works on view reflects the visual depth of her oeuvre, mirroring layers of remembrance, practice and ritual both formally and thematically. 

Insisting on transformation as an existential and artistic premise, Tadáskía presents large-scale mixed-media drawings on paper with torn edges. The artist’s nuanced palette unfolds into chromatic zones that are sometimes sunny and vibrant, sometimes more crepuscular, almost nocturnal. Graphic entanglements combine with reliefs of folded sheets and sculptures, declaring a clear emphasis on volume and the distribution of full-bodied forms in space. These compositions reveal beings and structures that seem caught in the midst of mutation or that suggest changes to come. Between fable-like images and cosmic or otherworldly states, Tadáskía proposes impermanence and transitivity, visual and symbolic aspects that bear witness to ladybug joaninha’s saga through the artist’s enchanted, playful world.

“It is according to this transformative vocation that in the exhibition we desecrate the mirror as an archetypal form of representation and relationality. With Ana Cláudia Almeida & Tadáskía, we want to unlearn the comparative grammar that converted proximities into similarities and naturalized translation as an exercise in adapting foreign meanings to the terms of our own metrics” – Clarissa Diniz