Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel is proud to present Cerâmicas, São Paulo-based artist Allan Gandhi’s first solo exhibition in Rio de Janeiro, opening June 27 at Aquário, the front space at Carpintaria dedicated to new voices in the arts circuit. At the invitation of Tiago Carneiro da Cunha, Gandhi was invited to show ceramic works for the first time in dialogue with his exhibition Férias Para Sempre [Holidays forever] opening on the same day in the gallery’s main space. The show also features paintings on sandpaper, whose abrasive qualities echo the coarse finishes of the ceramics.

These new pieces translate into a new medium the artist’s emphasis on the physical act of painting and his transformative approach to portraiture and figuration, in which faces, gestures, and bodily forms are distorted and vaporized in a shifting cast of characters. The artist’s pictorial effects, transported onto ceramic’s mineral surface, acquire volume and texture, extending beyond the plane as material secretions. 

Gandhi destabilizes conventional pictorial space and introduces a sense of discontinuity that extends beyond the limits of a single image. Rather than following predetermined narratives, his paintings emerge through an intuitive process informed by sketches, visual notes, and imagined characters, creating works that inhabit a fluid territory between fiction and fantasy. Cropped in unsettling proximity, or cut-out in profile, the faces the artist depicts convey an ambiguous tension between intimacy and repulsion, simultaneously endearing and grotesque. 

Among the artist’s recent solo shows are Room Temperature, Mendes Wood DM, Brussels (2026) and Allan Gandhi, Sardenberg, São Paulo (2025). Relevant group shows include Head Stretch, Andrew Krepps Gallery, New York (2026)l Fartura, Luisa Strina, São Paulo (2025) and Pequenas pinturas, auroras, São Paulo (2025).