Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel presents Maldita Comédia, a solo show by Tiago Carneiro da Cunha at Galpão in São Paulo. The artist’s first show at the gallery since 2019 features five large-scale paintings that transport the public into his universe of images, inhabited by fantastic creatures, relationships and colors. The subject of these paintings deals with cosmic battles between forces of nature and hybrid, monstrous beings. Carneiro da Cunha organizes the action of his compositions at the edges, leaving the center open to the free circulation of nebulae, light beams and energy vortexes. The thick oil paint impasto in which the artist renders his forms carries a sense of accumulated matter and manual making that recalls sculpture, fundamental in the artist’s practice since the beginning of his career.

Repurposing the iconography of B movies, comic books and videomes, the works on view combine the visual vocabulary of animation with Tiago’s ironic sense of humor. The pieces yoke together a dimension of openly playful character and scene design as much as they harbor allegorical meanings, as if we were before a mythical repertoire of cosmic events. 

Thus, against an outer space backdrop, the pregnant woman in Hereditária (2023), echoing the posture of Michelangelo’s Adam, awakes symbolic associations of fertility, creation, and a primordial edenic state. In Atlético (2023), the artist depicts a man holding a ball over his shoulders, like Atlas, that he threatens to throw into a spiral galaxy. At the center is a tubular plumbing arch, like those transporting water over the polluted Tietê river, situating the composition in the contemporary environment of ecological collapse. In the same piece, Carneiro da Cunha paints his titan with tanlines on his comically rounded buttocks, reminding us that in his practice epic themes are always a step away from comic deflation.