Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel presents Até um carvalho enlouqueceu [Even an Oak Went Mad], a group exhibition featuring works by Richard Aldrich (USA), Laís Amaral (Brazil), Bruno Dunley (Brazil), and Marina Rheingantz (Brazil). Opening February 7 in Barra Funda, the exhibition brings together artists from different contexts whose practices share a sustained engagement with abstraction as a material, perceptual, and temporal process — turning the invisible into tangible pictorial elements.

The exhibition title refers to the myth of Orpheus, whose music was said to move animals, stones, and even trees, suspending distinctions between animate and inanimate matter. In these accounts, the force of music lies not in narrative or meaning but in sound itself, acting directly on bodies and substances. This idea provides a framework for the exhibition, in which abstraction unfolds through rhythm, density, repetition, and material behavior. Within this frame, Bruno Dunley’s paintings test the instability of form through chromatic tension and compositional hesitation. Laís Amaral works through accumulation and erasure, allowing surfaces to register time, pressure, and residue. Marina Rheingantz constructs spatial fields that oscillate between landscape, memory, and abstraction without resolving into image. Richard Aldrich approaches painting as a site of transfer, where marks, references, and material decisions remain provisional and mobile.

Across the works on view, abstraction is approached not as a reduction of image but as a mode of address that does not rely on representation. Lines, stains, planes, and accumulations register as physical facts, producing situations that are concrete yet not fully legible. Meaning remains unstable, emerging through proximity and duration rather than explanation. The works function less as illustrations than as events that take place in time and space. Several paintings present themselves as systems of internal behavior. Pigments bleed, congeal, or resist; surfaces alternate between areas of attraction and refusal; passages of visual intensity give way to quieter zones. These dynamics shape how the works are encountered, suggesting actions that have passed into objects and continue to operate there.