Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel presents Paisagem Selvagem, Leda Catunda’s new solo show at Carpintaria, which marks her return to Rio de Janeiro a decade after her last exhibition at the Museu de Arte Moderna. The works on view show a baroque inflection in the artist’s research, in which the accumulation of textile elements and image citations that characterize her work is intensified through the multiplication of procedures and ornaments and the proliferation of tongue-like flaps, protuberances, stuffed bellies and many-colored cloth appendages. Reflecting on the flux of visual and digital stimuli, Catunda tackles our incessant exposure to the icons, signs and emblems of mass culture.

Adding a range of landscape references to this typically contemporary dimension, the artist opens up a path toward a paradoxical joining of nature and artifice, de-hierarchizing pretensions of taste and high and low registers in an omnivorous, voracious process. In these hybrids of painting and object, historical motifs such as the catholic saint in São Tomás (2024) coexist with logos and ready-made prints in a work such as Paisagem Selvagem II (2024). In Cinema (2024), t-shirt prints with images of cult movies such as Lolita or Back to the Future form the surface of a cushioned volume, in a compilation of references gathered by the artist that weaves together the affective dimension of memory and the products of the culture industry. 

The making of curved, winding, wrinkled, rolled, folded, accumulated, antithetical and labyrinthine forms reaches a fever pitch in the aforementioned Paisagem Selvagem II and Caprichosa (2024), where this visual cornucopia is arrayed in a tableau of fragmentary scenes. In these compositions, this body of work’s maximalist, cumulative tendency is condensed in a particularly emphatic manner. 

Since her last solo show in 2023 at ICA Milano in Italy, Catunda’s emphasis on drapery, stitching and patterns turn clothing, silhouette and human physiognomy into materials for formal and conceptual composition, specifically in works such as Sete Saias (2024).

“The excess of images in everything that surrounds us creates a strong illusion of speed. Whether in the virtual world, on the internet, or in real life on the restless surfaces that cover cities, streets, buildings or even people’s clothes, this poignant visuality seems to provoke the sensation of a shortening of time. Thus, we become anxious about the future, about a future that surprises us even without having been able to choose. In this new reality, nothing happens, everything flows. And in this way, life follows the crazy flow of sudden events. Adaptation implies a different kind of reasoning, a modification of the associative system to rediscover the ability to read this new reality and ensure space for new ideas and new destinies.” – Leda Catunda

A critical essay by Carlos Eduardo Riccioppo, PhD professor at the Visual Arts Department at Universidade Estadual Paulista – Unesp, accompanies the exhibition.