Gaep presents Wild Metaphysics, a group exhibition bringing together six contemporary Brazilian artists whose works explore the extraordinary, the dreamlike, and the metaphysical: Thiago Barbalho, Maria Nepomuceno, Mariana Rocha, Guga Szabzon, Marina Woisky, and Michel Zózimo. The exhibition delves into “cartographies of the imagination that extend beyond physical spaces to create singular universes in which the boundary between reality and fantasy becomes permeable,” as curator Sylvia Monasterios puts it. This is the first presentation in Romania of the practices of all six artists.
Wild Metaphysics is infused with literature — magical realism, fantastic literature, and the infinite field of possibilities generated by fiction in general. As in the stories of Jorge Luis Borges, where everyday reality is gradually eroded by an imaginary world, reality itself becomes malleable under the influence of the artists’ imagination. They “turn to territories of the imaginary, fiction, and magical thinking to open up new paths, approaching these spaces as though they were as real as the tangible world and suggesting that contemporary art, through its visionary potential, can inhabit and expand them,” explains Sylvia Monasterios.
The exhibition’s title itself is borrowed from a reflection on literature. In her afterword to Leonora Carrington’s novel The Hearing Trumpet, Olga Tokarczuk writes: “Two qualities of fiction seem to me astonishing and particularly moving: its openness and extravagant metaphysics. (…) In my view, the second quality touches upon a very serious question: Why do we read novels? Our own experience is too small, our beings too helpless to grasp the complexity and enormity of the universe; we want to see life up close, to glimpse the existence of others. And, however banal it may sound, this is a metaphysical question: On what principles does the world function?”
Working primarily in drawing, Thiago Barbalho creates complex compositions in which a multitude of images, symbols, and fields of color come together. Various references from history, high and popular culture, philosophy, and everyday life are also brought together in what art critic Kiki Mazzucchelli describes as “a kind of ‘exploded literature’ that emerges from fragmented narratives.” For Wild Metaphysics, the artist has created four works on canvas, as well as an in-situ drawing. Covering an entire gallery wall, the drawing envelops the more intimate works on canvas and is complemented by three-dimensional elements.
Rich in color, culture, and metaphor, Maria Nepomuceno’s works evoke animals, plants, the human body, and landscapes at radically different scales, from the microscopic to the macroscopic. Their biomorphic and organic quality is essential to understanding the sculptures: the spiral, a key element in the artist’s practice, reflects forms that occur naturally throughout the universe, shaping entire galaxies as well as DNA, the code of life.
Mariana Rocha investigates bodies of water, bringing together bodily and cosmic dimensions. In her paintings, cells expand until they reveal galaxies, while cosmic space contracts until it fits inside a single vein. Through this constant movement between the microscopic and the infinitely vast, the artist suggests that closely observing a living body — human or otherwise — also means investigating the origins of all things.
Guga Szabzon maps bodily sensations, memories, dreams, and inventions of the imagination onto felt. Using a sewing machine, she creates lines that seem to dance across the surface of the felt, as well as empty spaces where the thread has room to breathe. The viewer may imagine landscapes, stars, maps, skies, moving bodies, flowing waters, bridges, paths, and many other things.
The works by Marina Woisky in the exhibition occupy a liminal space between two and three dimensions. The artist uses textiles printed with images — digital photographs of decorative objects and ornaments with organic forms — which she then fills with cement and resin to create hybrid forms that blur the boundary between reality and fantasy.
Michel Zózimo’s drawings invite us into a vibrant universe in which animals, plants, and, at times, human bodies intermingle and merge, with no hierarchy between them. His visual vocabulary draws inspiration from old books, particularly bestiaries and encyclopedias, alongside a wide range of other interests, including fantastic literature, Dadaist experiments, religious rituals, and the science of impossible things.
The exhibition can be visited until October 24, 2026.
