Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel presents piruetas de olhos abertos [spinning, eyes open], a new exhibition by Janaina Tschäpe, her first solo show in São Paulo since 2019. Occupying the gallery’s space in Barra Funda, the exhibition brings together a selection of large-scale panoramic paintings in oil and oil stick, watercolor, and pastel. Produced between her studio in New York, where she lives, and Bocaina in Minas Gerais, her refuge in Brazil, the works are built through sweeping, calligraphic markings that combine a script-like fluency with turbulent masses of mingling color. Working in close proximity to natural dynamics, the artist approaches painting as a field of instability and response. Gesture and drawing operate in tension: the immediacy of the brushstroke meets the resistance of the line, each alternately interrupting and slowing the other. Rather than constructing a resolved image, the work unfolds as an event shaped by time, exchange, and transformation.

The landscape of Bocaina, marked by dense vegetation, mineral outcrops, shifting light, and the slower rhythms of a non-urban environment, informs these compositions in decisive ways. Rather than depicting specific sites, Tschäpe absorbs the region’s atmosphere, translating its humidity, verticality, and layered horizons into fields of color and mark-making. warm field (Giftgrün) (2026), a vast painting, is charged with this attunement to natural environments. A turbulent arrangement of earthy reds, ochres, and browns forms a mineral atmosphere in which bursts of green recall fleeting views of vegetation. What is at stake is coherence under pressure—the structure that arises from within the process itself. This sensibility unfolds in dialogue with the artist’s life in New York, where the complexity of the urban fabric, vertiginous speed, and disorienting architecture of the city offer a contrasting spatial experience that subtly permeates the paintings. A work such as swept away (2026) expresses this ambient mood: the porous boundaries between sky, water, and earth find echoes in fluid, vaporous compositions, where abstraction and landscape converge.

dando piruetas de olhos abertos (2026), a large-scale canvas in saturated reds and blues, sets an important tone for the group presented in the exhibition. Its title introduces the idea of action within the landscape: rather than describing a place, it suggests a body in motion, “doing pirouettes with eyes open.” In this way, the viewer is implied and subtly invited to enter the painting and become part of its shifting spatial logic, as horizons tilt, elements rotate, and figuration seems to emerge only to dissolve again within the surrounding chromatic field. Joining the physicality of her gestures with vivid palettes that evoke vegetal, aquatic, and geological registers, the works recall processes of growth, erosion, and transformation, creating images that feel less like representations of nature than extensions of its rhythms.