A Changing and Dissident Universe
ORMA + IPERCUBO / MILAN - IT
2 October – 21 November 2025The exhibition A Changing and Dissident Universe marks the first collaboration between the galleries Orma and Ipercubo, symbolizing a dialogue between two entities that contribute to the contemporary art scene through both emerging and established artists from around the world. The group show inaugurates the new space at Via dei Bossi 2/A in Milan, presenting itself as a plural observatory capable of resonating with the interconnected condition in which we live today.
In the heart of the city, paintings from China, the United States, and Brazil come together in a single space, generating a field of tensions and possibilities that mirrors the contradictions and transformations of our time.
In this context, the words of Édouard Glissant echo: “diversity is no longer an obstacle, but the very condition of relation.” The exhibition’s title, inspired by the poetry of Amelia Rosselli, recalls her ability to weave languages, symbols, and roots into a living organism—where language itself becomes a metaphor for cultural differences and their fractures. The works presented for the first time in Italy act as a thread narrating decentralization.
Within this horizon, the works of José Victor De Castro Negreiros, Austin Hayman, Daniel Lannes, Luciano Maia, Zhang Qi, and Zhao Wenliang unfold: multiple voices that, to quote Rosselli, sound like “low strings” capable of vibrating even when no one touches them.
The focus is not solely on the artwork itself, but on the dialogue it establishes—a deviation and a becoming, a crossing of languages, symbols, and imaginaries that build a landscape born of relations, where every vision is already imbued with another gaze. This horizon finds a historical echo in the Venice Biennale, founded in 1895 as a “meeting among peoples through art,” which, with the opening of the first national pavilion in 1907, became a true mosaic of voices and perspectives.
As in Rosselli’s verses, even within the Giardini of the Biennale, plurality cannot be reduced to a single measure. It manifests as a field of tensions and possibilities where art becomes a space of resistance. That dialogue also resonates today: in 2025, the year of the 36th São Paulo Bienal, the curatorial project Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice draws inspiration from the migratory patterns of birds, focusing on the idea of humanity as a practice of constant movement, encounter, and negotiation.
This perspective reaffirms that art not only reflects the movements of history and culture but transforms them into forms of relation, revealing the condition of a world in perpetual crossing. The metaphor of travellers brings with it a collective reflection on humanity and on the systems of knowledge and division we have built over time. Art thus becomes a privileged place to question anew what it means to be human. The exhibition invites the public to recognize themselves in the gaze of the other. Beyond merely contemplating images, it proposes an experience of shifting perception—seeing oneself through external perspectives and allowing oneself to be questioned by the reflection of the other.
This proposal ultimately leads us to ask: what do we truly see when we look at ourselves and when we look at others, as we confront the visible and invisible barriers and frontiers that shape our societies?
Magic Echoes: Brazil Diasporas’ Vibrant Encounters with Ancestrality
M+B Gallery / Los Angeles - CA
21 February – 22 March 2025
The exhibition Magic Echoes: Brazil Diasporas’ Vibrant Encounters with Ancestrality presents works by twelve Brazilian artists: Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato, Arorá, Chen Kong Fang, Chico da Silva, Gustavo Caboco, Hiram Latorre, Lia D Castro, Lu Ferreira, Lucas Almeida, Luciano Maia, Mateus Moreira, and Thiago Molon.
Brazil is a country of many—many origins and traditions, many histories, cultures and beliefs, many peoples in many lands coexisting within common spaces of belonging and inequality. The historical materiality narrates a process of supposed conformity of our polyvalent diversity.
According to traditional narratives dating back to the colonial period, the various displaced ethnicities and cultures combined uniformly to produce pacified identities whose differences unite ‘organically’ under a single idea of “Brazilianness”. This process, alienating and oppressive, ignores the genocide endured by Indigenous peoples and their descendants and minimizes the dehumanizing experience imposed on African peoples through enslavement.
However, the colonial barbarism imposed by this process in an effort to distance individuals from the memory of their origins and ancestral traditions has always been met with strong resistance by Black and Indigenous peoples in Brazil. Their cultural and symbolic productions endure distances and continue to strengthen Brazil’s diasporic identities.
Over the past two centuries, other dynamics and transnational movements have been introduced into Brazil. Critical transformations in cultural, social, and economic relations—locally and globally—have made converge the forces of new waves of immigration and internal exodus from rural to urban areas, driven by the inequality structure already established through colonization.
These phenomena continuously change the forms and spaces through which diffuse identities echo, producing collisions that demand new sensibilities. New compromises capable of relieving the pressure of unclaimed memories, the drive of unfulfilled desires for belonging, the abstinence of diasporic identities in search of ancestry.
If it is in the aesthetic realm where the battle once focused “on the promises of emancipation and the illusions and disillusions of history,” as the philosopher Jacques Rancière notes, then contemporary Brazilian painting presents us with vibrant representations of the mysterious reconciliation between the marvel of the image and the relativity of the real.
Through the works of artists from different origins and geographic and racial identities—whose pictorial spaces pulse with a magical resonance of timeless forms, landscapes and things transformed into strange familiars—the exhibition Magic Echoes promotes healing, critical reflection and the symbolic re-imagining of diasporic legacies, seeking to understand the contradictions of the past and the constantly shifting differences of the present.
In the exhibition, the quartet composed of Chen Kong Fang and Amadeo Lorenzato—representatives of the figurative tradition of modernist vanguards—and Lia D Castro and Hiram Latorre—contemporary artists who critically and renewingly revisit modernist qualities—present different approaches to Brazilian painting in representing deep interiorities, in which figures and forms make the voids move and then halt.
This group of paintings suggests that the encounter between diasporas and ancestries is not only dialectical but also meditative. Through summaries of essential representation and asymmetric compositions that express tense balances, the paintings reflect on the importance of empty spaces in investigating what shapes the reality of the encounter. The meditative treatment thus reveals the mysterious aspects of what’s considered normal.
Paintings by Thiago Molon, Gustavo Caboco, Chico da Silva, and Lu Ferreira are also brought into dialogue in the exhibition. These artists draw on distinct visual and symbolic repertoires to produce complex abstractions filled with fragments and immanences that do not consolidate encounters between diaspora and ancestry, but rather reinvent their sensibilities. The noisy texture of Molon’s compositions complements the profusion of colors from Caboco, da Silva and Ferreira.
The figurative styles of Molon, Caboco and da Silva are inseparable from the visual tradition of Brazil’s first diasporic peoples—the Indigenous and African peoples—but cannot be restricted to the continuity of a single tradition. Meanwhile, Ferreira’s images allude to emotional processes of fragmentation and reformulation undertaken in the claim for ancestries, without the pretension of reaching definitive origins or meanings.
Mateus Moreira, Lucas Almeida and Luciano Maia engage with the subjective treatment of essentially universal representations. Similar to the group formed by Fang, Lorenzato, D Castro and Latorre, they focus on imagined interiorities yet produce more experimental pathways for negotiating identities.
Whether in the reinterpretation of myths and folklore, as in Maia’s case; or in the mixing of materials and interdisciplinary references, as in Almeida’s; or in the imagistic projection of existential melancholies, as in Moreira’s—these paintings offer relational narratives of healing and empowerment for diverse viewpoints and identities.
As in many American countries, many of Brazil’s diasporas were guided by the moon. Leveled by sea waves echoing from distant continents or guided by the night-light and stars, the routes of these collective displacements hold a conflicted process of losses and pains, secrets and dreams, crossing generations in search of re-signification.
It is no coincidence that the moon, or analogous forms to it, appears in some of the paintings in the exhibition: the moon we see today is the same one faced by our ancestors in their crossings, travels and escapes. The impulse to encounter diasporic ancestry—one that precedes and is unaware of trauma—is the same trust in the magic of the moon to produce the tide that crosses all times and spaces on earth, regardless of humanity.
Gazing at the shimmering enchantment of the moon makes it possible to weave together the entire world and the gazes divided by history and revived by memory, which turn toward it through longing for that which can never be known again.
— Gabriela Gotoda
WHAT WE CARRY
Patel Brown Gallery / Toronto - Canada
July 12 - September 6, 2025What We Carry explores how identity is not fixed but continually shaped —stitched together from memory, inheritance, and the tactile presence of materials. Through abstraction, layering, surface, and spatial composition, each work becomes a site where identity is constructed not as a singular truth, but as a process formed through encounter, gesture, repetition, and time.
Patterns, textures, and mythologies are called upon not to define, but to unfix and unravel the illusion of a stable self and to challenge inherited structures of meaning. The material itself becomes both subject and medium: fabric, pigment, paper, and form are used to carry stories that are often felt more than told. These works invite us to consider how knowledge moves not through language alone, but through ritual, through repetition, through the quiet memory of touch.
The body, whether present, implied, or absent, anchors these investigations. It becomes both container and transmitter, absorbing cultural codes and reflecting personal, political, and spiritual histories. Across the exhibition, viewers move between what is kept and what is transformed, what is known and what resists naming.
Rather than offering identity as something to be resolved, the works gathered here affirm its multiplicity. They evoke a sense of lineage without prescription, and of transformation without finality. In this space, identity is not a destination, but a passage: an ongoing practice of assembling, unmaking, and remaking.
luccianomaia.contato@gmail.com
A graduate of Universidade Cândido Mendes (Rio de Janeiro), Maia began his artistic journey in 2020, quickly developing a distinctive language characterized by layered compositions, hybrid figures, and symbolic imagery. His work reflects on the complexity of
belonging and resists fixed interpretations, navigating tensions between inner and collective worlds, ancestral roots and modern experience.
He was a finalist for the 14th Garimpo DasArtes Prize and awarded second place at the 10th Levino Fanzeres Visual Arts Salon. His works are part of the public collection of Levino Fanzeres Gallery (Espírito Santo). In 2024, he held his first group exhibition, If the Future Brings
the Past Back at Galeria 25M (São Paulo), and presents his first solo show, Desires Kept Beneath the River, at Paço das Artes (São Paulo), curated by Renato de Cara.
Upcoming projects include his participation in Magic Echoes – Brazil Diasporas’ Vibrant Encounters with Ancestrality at M+B Gallery (Los Angeles), the cultural program O Boto (São Paulo), and artisti residencies and talks such as DomoDamo and MASP Professores. His work proposes a fluid and poetic iconography that translates memory and myth into visual form, moving between delicacy and unrest, intimacy and collectivity.
2025 - ArtVerona
2025 - “DomoDamo”- Residência de Arte - São Paulo
2025 - “Águas, terras e memórias - MASP professores - palestra online - São Paulo
2025 - “O Boto” - Vai Programa de incentivo à Cultura da cidade de São Paulo - Curadoria Gabriel Babolim
2025 - “Magic Echoes - Brazil Diasporas’ Vibrant Encounters with Ancestrality”- M+B Los Angeles
2024 - “Desejos guardados sob o rio” individual - Paço Das Artes - São Paulo, curadoria de Renato de Cara
2024 - “Se o futuro trouxer o passado de volta” - coletiva - 25M - São Paulo, curadoria de Pedro Scudeler
2024 - Salão de Artes Visuais de Vinhedo 2024
2023 - Finalista 14o Prêmio Garimpo DasArtes 2024
2023 - Nano Arthub - Feira de arte - Produção de Thomaz Pacheco - São Paulo
2023 - 19o Salão de Artes Visuais de Ubatuba - São Paulo
2023 - “Beautiful and Grotesque - International Art Competition” - Londres
2023 - Art Collide 2023 - 8a edição Feira Compartiarte - Centro Brasileiro Britânico - São Paulo
2023 - 2o colocado no prêmio do 10o Salão de Artes Visuais Levino Fanzeres - Cachoeiro do Itapemirim - Espírito Santo
Last Updated 24.10.31