Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel and Gomide&Co are proud to present “Para-raios para energias confusas”, a group show curated by Luisa Duarte and Marilia Loureiro at Galpão, in São Paulo.

Setting off from a reflection on new artificial intelligence technologies, the curators propose an intergenerational dialog between 16 artists that place contemporary alienation under scrutiny and invite the public to speculate on the production of subjectivities through the association of differences. In the words of Duarte and Loureiro, what is at stake is “A path in which the simultaneously confused and diffuse energies of the contemporary world do not lead us to succumb or adhere to fear, nor harden before destabilization. This unbalance, then, can be elaborated toward the attuning of vital tangles capable of keeping alive an opening of meaning.”

Adriana Varejão’s works reconfigure scientific techniques of population census, submitting them to formal organization tactics that point to the subjectivity and the incessant fluctuation of race signifiers in the post-colonial context of Brazil. This procedure is similar to that of Luiza Crosman, who emulates the visual culture of scientific graphs in her drawings to,ultimately, frustrate their utilitarian vocation. Negalê Jones and Rebeca Carapiá bring into play invisible dimensions of the artwork, amplifying the energetic properties of plants into sound waves, in the first case, and installing a field of electrical reverberations between the human body and copper in the second. Tiago Mestre’s video installation projects shadows into the gallery, simultaneously obscuring and illuminating the surrounding architecture, like Lydia Okumura’s site-specific sculpture, which takes advantage of colors and the corners of the walls to project an impossible polygon into space. Cristiano Lenhardt, Juliana dos Santos and Renata Haar use drawing to give a pictorial form to the exchange between recognizable contours and familiar shapes.

Historical artists such as León Ferrari and Mira Schendel also participate in the exhibition with two sculptures, Untitled (1978/1982) and Droguinhas (1965/1966) that recompose space through lines, emptied volumes and the twisting of different materials. Cinthia Marcelle’s video work, Verdade ou Desafio (2018) and the installation Elo | Link (2023) by Sara Ramo, produces connections between the works in the show, with a revolving triangle that points in different directions, in the case of Marcelle, or an immense cord of heterogeneous materials, in Ramo’s case. Anderson Borba and Maria Lira Marques present works that start from organic elements such as wood and natural pigment to produce composite objects with a skilful and eloquent craft, while the sculptures by Sonia Gomes use sewing as a compositional method for volumes that make the concatenation of disparate textures a formal principle.