Wild Metaphysics

Wild Metaphysics brings together six contemporary Brazilian artists whose practices explore the extraordinary, the oneiric, and the metaphysical. About Wild Metaphysics brings together six contemporary Brazilian artists whose practices explore the extraordinary, the oneiric, and the metaphysical. Forms and colors intertwine and dissolve into nonlinear narratives capable of collapsing the limits between object and ground, figuration and abstraction, wakefulness and dream, the conscious and the unconscious. The exhibition delves into cartographies of the imagination that extend beyond physical spaces, creating singular universes in which the boundaries between reality and fantasy become porous. Here, gestural abstraction takes precedence over representation, resisting fixed formal categories, remaining neither explicit nor literal. The ultimate impression is that what lies before the eye is somehow still in motion. Wild Metaphysics is inevitably permeated by literature, drawing from magical realism, fantastic literature, and the infinite field of possibilities that fiction opens up beyond the real, a realm in which the supernatural can coexist with everyday life elements. As in Jorge Luis Borges' stories, where an imaginary world ends up eroding the reality we take for granted, reality itself becomes malleable, while imagination necessarily subverts and alters it. Through intense color palettes and evocative forms, the works enter into dialogue with a literary and theoretical universe: from the magnetic fields that emerge in Thiago Barbalho's drawings, to the Notívagos in Michel Zózimo's work (which references Funes, the protagonist of Borges's short story Funes the Memorious) and the dictionaries and maps of imaginary places found in Guga Szabzon's textile works. The title of the exhibition itself is borrowed from a reflection on literature by Olga Tokarczuk. In her afterword to Leonora Carrington's novel The Hearing Trumpet, the Polish writer notes: "There are two qualities in fiction that I find particularly astonishing and moving: open-endedness and wild metaphysics. […] To my mind, the second quality touches on a very serious question: Why do we read novels in the first place? Our own experience is too small, our beings too helpless, to make sense of the complexity and enormity of the universe; we desire to see life up close, to get a glimpse of the existences of others. And banal as it might sound, this is a metaphysical question: On what principles does the world operate?" The six artists turn to the territories of the imaginary, fiction, and magical thinking to open new pathways, approaching these spaces as though they were as real as the material world and suggesting that contemporary art, through its visionary potential, is capable of inhabiting and expanding them. What their works ultimately propose is that the principles governing the world are far less fixed than we assume. In this sense, their practices also question the fundamental nature of existence, time, and space, reminding us that to imagine is already to shape reality. Text by Sylvia Monasterios, curator