As 2024 comes to a close, we at Galeria Estação will always remember this year with joy: it marks our twenty years in the business!
Did it go by quickly? For those looking from the outside, perhaps. For us, it has been a time filled with learning and achievements! We’ve faced challenges and conflicts, but above all, we’ve gained recognition and prominence in the ever-competitive art market. This has been possible thanks to the journey we've taken alongside my partner from the very beginning, Roberto Eid Philipp, and our entire team.
2024 has also been special for me! I celebrated forty years as a gallerist and published Moderno / Contemporâneo / Popular / Brasileiro – O olhar de Vilma Eid with WMF Martins Fontes, which chronicles my journey and showcases my personal collection and Galeria Estação.
And there’s more. As we close the year, we are opening the exhibition Metamorphoses & distances. This show, centered on the concept of metamorphosis in indigenous, popular, and contemporary art, will feature works by Tunga, Salmi Lopez, Nuno Ramos, Jandyra Waters, Manuel and Francisco Graciano, José Bezerra, Véio, Artur Pereira, among others.
A heartfelt thank you to our invited curator, friend, and companion throughout these twenty years, Lorenzo Mammì.
Vilma Eid
METAMORPHOSES AND DISTANCES
This exhibition explores two constants in Brazilian art, not just in popular art: the transformation or instability of forms, and the distance, in two senses: as detachment or estrangement from the represented space, and as the construction of centripetal, closed forms that isolate themselves from the space in which they are placed. These are not two distinct characteristics, as if each artwork could belong solely to one of them. In many cases, they coexist simultaneously, in a dialectical tension. However, the opposition between them seemed useful for addressing a material with such varied origins and outcomes in a transversal way.
Fluid forms, transitions, and ambiguities are constants in Brazilian art, especially after the concretist phase. Rather than assertive forms, many artists favor unstable configurations that suggest the passage from one form to another. An established reading posits that this reflects a not fully formed condition of our art system and public space. This is plausible. Yet recent anthropological literature, pointing to the fluidity of distinctions among species in Indigenous cultures and the "structural inconstancy of the 'wild soul'" (Viveiros de Castro), may suggest another reading—not opposing, but complementary: perhaps the preference for processes of transformation is not only a creative response to the fragility of artistic institutions but also the emergence, in times of crisis, of a more ancient imaginary. If this is true, the so-called popular art, produced in Brazil outside of the Academies and meeting the needs of the majority since the colonial period, will be a privileged ground for investigation: it is where the essence of a common culture is formed.
The reference to Indigenous culture is explicitly evident in the fantastical zoology of Chico da Silva from the same region. But thousands of kilometers away in Paraguay, Salmi Lopez, of the Ishir ethnicity, also describes interspecies relationships: in his drawings, supplemented by explanatory texts, shamans descended from a mother fish transform into birds that fight in the sky. Sometimes the derivation from Indigenous culture is not so direct, yet the kinship seems undeniable. Manoel and Francisco Graciano (father and son, from Ceará) are masters of metamorphosis: they explore the contours and veins of tree trunks to create composite beings, intricately intertwined. Even a sculptor known for more compact and polished forms, like Artur Pereira, suggests a symbiosis among human figures, animals, and trees in his series Caçadas (Hunts). Finally, in the works of Véio and José Bezerra, it is the wood itself that seems to transform, taking on animal or human life, while the artist merely accompanies the process with discreet interventions.
In Western thought, indeterminacy is not a potential for dialogue among species but a threat of indistinction that must be kept in check. Its exemplary figure is Proteus, the god of transformation whom Odysseus binds to force him to reveal the truth. But Proteus’s truth is not that of Odysseus. It reveals itself in the instability of materials and beings, which Tunga explores in both the alchemical drawings of La Voie humide and his latest three-dimensional series, Morfologias (Morphologies). Nuno Ramos dedicated a series of drawings (two of which are in this exhibition) to Proteus’s truth, where a very simple formal scheme (two straight lines and two curves) becomes contaminated by gestures and contact with the material of pigments.
A more mysterious and subtle fusion is found in Jandyra Waters, who produced non-geometric abstract canvases in the 1960s, which are not informal either, full of zoomorphic suggestions. Waters was closely associated with the psychoanalyst, critic, and collector Theon Spanudis, who at the time advocated for an abstraction that extended beyond rational organization of forms to embrace the imaginary (perhaps with slight surrealist influence) and aspired to transcendence.
The second part of the exhibition, dedicated to "distances," is more composite.
Strictly speaking, the concept of “distance” primarily applies to the series of landscapes on display here. In all of them, there is a sense of detachment, almost of exile—a form of alienation from the place, an impossibility of belonging. This is not limited to popular art: great erudite Brazilian painters evoke the same feeling: Guignard, Pancetti, Koch—all with good reasons to feel foreign in their homeland. Moreover, Cardosinho, present here with six paintings, is not exactly a popular painter: a Portuguese who studied philosophy and taught Latin and French in school, he only began painting after retiring in 1931, at the age of seventy. It’s as if he were a 19th-century man gazing at modern art (which he knew from his associations with Portinari and Foujita and from participating in major artistic events, starting with the Revolutionary Salon of 1931) through a window—or rather, through newspaper pages and the postcards he meticulously reproduced, sometimes even adhering to the black and white of the photographs.
The almost metaphysical suspension characterizing Cardosinho’s canvases echoes another form of strangeness, that of Júlio Martins’s landscapes—who, in contrast, is a typically carioca figure: bohemian, carnival-loving, without a steady job until he became a cook at the Hotel Avenida. Yet his paintings depict another place, viewed from afar and above, with wealthy palaces surrounded by well-tended gardens, where elegantly diminutive figures stroll among statues that gesture more than they do. Everything is mediated by soft colors, predominantly soothing shades of green. It’s almost the exact reverse of Cardosinho: a 19th century imagined by a man of the 20th century. In this setting, each element becomes isolated, as if it were more named than seen.
The internal division is more pronounced in Neves Torres. He paints another world, but this one truly existed: a tractor driver for most of his life and a painter only in old age, like Cardosinho, Neves Torres once owned a small farm, and it is from this place that his paintings speak. His works are divided into juxtaposed areas, each containing a detail: men and women working or resting, crops, animals—as if the painter extracted them one by one from memory. Yet sometimes, with slight modifications, these patchwork areas of color become creatures or monsters. Another, more unsettling narrative emerges from behind the bucolic scene. A toothy mouth threatens the man resting in a hammock; another man, by the pond, has his body transformed into a table. The metamorphic factor, which threatens the organized world, justifies the inclusion of some of Neves Torres’s paintings in the first section of the exhibition.
The tension between compartmentalization and transformation is far more dramatic in Aurelino. Here, the orthogonal layout of the canvas, often reminiscent of his city (Salvador) viewed in plan or section, attempts to contain the uncontrolled proliferation of images. This is how Prinzhorn described the paintings of schizophrenics in the early 20th century: a rigid categorical structure desperately trying to organize an extremely unstable visual material. In Aurelino’s case, the effort to contain results in some figures, pressed by the outlines, becoming rigid in a hieratic posture that surprisingly echoes the reflective and self-aware art of Agnaldo dos Santos.
More than referencing Afro-Brazilian art, Agnaldo’s sculptures connect to African art, which he encountered mainly through Pierre Verger. We are now in another realm, described by anthropologists like Philippe Descola as totemic, in contrast to Indigenous animism. The image embodies an ancestral quality that is preserved by being a closed, impenetrable, and compact body. Even the heads of Conceição dos Bugres, while evidently Indigenous, possess this totemic character. The technique of yellow wax coating, learned by Conceição in a dream, accentuates this isolation. The same sacredness emanates from Dona Isabel’s ceramics: her women, styled and dressed in modern attire, nonetheless retain the solemnity of a totem. Originally, they were water jugs, repositories of precious water.
But from Neves Torres’s paintings, we can also draw another thread: the organization of juxtaposed areas resembles the sculptures of Nino, who also uses isolated figures against varied colored backgrounds, creating a surprising mix of three-dimensional sculpture and bas-relief. Also from Ceará, Nino is almost a complementary opposite of the Gracianos: in their work, figures do not merge; in his, they relate from a distance, like elements of a riddle.
Here, another technique stands out: enumeration. In Nino’s work, it still involves the association of distinct figures, each with its own characteristics. The unity is narrative, like different episodes of a fable. However, it may involve the same figures repeated, sometimes in different positions, unified by belonging to the same block of wood or inscribed in geometric shapes, as seen in Artur Pereira’s nativity scenes or G.T.O.’s “living wheels.” In Alcides’s work, however, repetition includes a disruptive factor. A Bahian who initially settled in Mato Grosso and later (since 1992) in São Paulo, Alcides initially painted bucolic scenes with delicate decorativeness. The impact of modernization begins to reveal itself in works like Presidente Castelo Highway and Woodcut, where the geometric shapes and flat colors of trucks, warehouses, and roads violently disrupt the serene rhythm of natural environments. It explodes in The Landscapes/The Coconuts, painted in São Paulo. In this canvas, the oval figures against a green background, containing irregular white patches, may represent open coconuts. The rest is organized in rows: a line of hay bales at the bottom, followed by a line of pots and another of various handcrafted items, arranged as if for a roadside sale; a couple seated on two benches, separated by a line of grass; and finally, on either side of the coconuts, four large oval forms that may represent flowering trees, yet also resemble the pots in the lower row. The meticulous enumeration of objects and the relative symmetry of the composition do not conceal the threat of imminent chaos, of a rural world on the brink of losing its meaning. It is, literally, a world in tatters.
Félix Farfan is an urban artist. He feels at home in the multiplication of stimuli, in the proliferation of disposable objects, in the intersecting web of information that thickens until, as Robert Smithson said, it becomes a compact shell upon which one can run. He clearly has one foot in underground culture, deriving from it a taste, of Eastern origin, for the analogical relationships between microcosm and macrocosm. But everything is inscribed in the closed circle of a system that reproduces itself to the point of vertigo: in this perspective, the human body objectifies itself in anatomical boards; the universe is encompassed in the totality of products that mass culture offers.
The exhibition also includes a sculpture by Elisa Bracher. Due to its centripetal force, where tension is generated internally, at the point where a log or stone rests on another, many of Bracher’s works can be likened to totemic forms. However, in this particular piece, and others from the same series, the blocks of wood house small niches containing clay houses: it is as if the closed body of the totem embeds the landscape. This sculpture particularly evokes the vertical landscapes of China, with their small dwellings nestled among rocks separated by clouds; or those of Guignard, whose proximity to Chinese art has often been noted. Yet the vapors have become solid; distance, a tangible presence. The strangeness remains a guarded treasure.
Lorenzo Mammì
Metamorphoses and Distances, a group exhibition curated by Lorenzo Mammì, concludes the series of shows celebrating the 20th anniversary of Galeria Estação.
Throughout 2024, Galeria Estação has hosted five unique exhibitions specially conceived to celebrate the 20 years since the space was founded by Vilma Eid and Roberto Eid Philipp. On November 7, the commemorative program will culminate with the public opening of Metamorphoses and Distances, a group exhibition featuring 62 works from 23 Brazilian artists across different generations.
The opening of this exhibition coincides with the launch of the book Moderno Contemporâneo Popular Brasileiro: the Vision of Vilma Eid, published by WMF Martins Fontes. This volume includes a critical text by Mammì, a photographic essay by Nelson Kon about Vilma's private collection and Galeria Estação, as well as an interview conducted by the engraver, painter, and sculptor Germana Monte-Mór and Daniel Rangel, an art critic and general curator of the Museum of Modern Art of Bahia.
Together, the exhibition and book offer a timely reflection on the 40 years of the collector, art dealer, and founder of the Instituto do Imaginário do Povo Brasileiro – IIPB ( Institute of the Imaginary of the Brazilian People), reaffirming Vilma Eid’s pivotal role in the valuation and critical reinterpretation of so-called popular art in Brazil, as well as in the inclusion of self-taught artists in the contemporary art circuit.
“The exhibition crowns not only this cycle of 20 years of Galeria Estação but also the work I began in 1984, when I opened my first gallery in partnership with Paulo Vasconcellos. These 40 years of work have been entirely devoted to popular art, driven by my passion and belief in it. Metamorphoses and Distances now concludes this cycle of celebrations and represents the work of many artists who have been with me throughout these four decades. In many exhibitions we have held at the gallery, there has been a strong dialogue between popular and contemporary art, a characteristic that will be very present in this show. I invited Lorenzo to curate because, during these 20 years of the gallery, he has also made important contributions and knows our work like few others. This exhibition is very symbolic as it represents a lifetime of work,” says Vilma.
Spanning paintings, drawings, and sculptures, Metamorphoses and Distances highlights the relevance of Galeria Estação in the art market, primarily featuring works from its own collection, including pieces by the following artists: G.T.O.; Alcides Pereira dos Santos; Chico da Silva; Félix Farfan; Francisco Graciano; Manuel Graciano; Véio; José Bezerra; Agnaldo Manoel dos Santos; Aurelino dos Santos; Artur Pereira; Conceição dos Bugres; Nino; Júlio Martins da Silva; Izabel Mendes da Cunha; Neves Torres; Jandyra Waters; Cardosinho; and Salmi López Balbuena. Of the 23 artists included in the selection made by the curator, only four are not represented by Galeria Estação: Tunga, Jaider Esbell, Elisa Bracher, and Nuno Ramos.
“My idea was to utilize this incredibly important source that Vilma’s gallery holds to understand the historical continuity of our popular art. In Brazil, there has been a consensus that after colonial art, there began academic art, without recognizing historical continuity. In fact, the academic art brought by the French Mission has a very limited influence on the Court and the bourgeoisie of Rio de Janeiro, while the rest of the country’s artists continued to draw from Afro-Brazilian and indigenous traditions. This history had not been consistently told before,” explains Mammì.
By establishing connections between works without the intention of closing off categories but rather creating suggestions of relationships, the curatorial proposal of Metamorphoses and Distances invites the public to develop their own interpretations regarding the potential dialogues among the works presented in the exhibition. This encouragement echoes Mammì’s assertion that Vilma triggered a “short circuit” in the visual arts environment, also responsible for fostering a new critical thought about Brazilian popular art through the investigations and discussions sparked among academics like Rodrigo Naves, Paulo Sergio Duarte, Tiago Mesquita, and Taisa Palhares.
“Vilma had the remarkable quality of taking popular art out of a more sociological niche, which brought a more ethnographic approach to this production through major authors like Lélia Coelho Frota and Clarival do Prado Valladares. Vilma positioned popular art within the realm of contemporary art, treating its artists as contemporary artists and organizing ways to hold exhibitions, market works, and invite critics to discuss this material. This created a very interesting shock because some critics, especially Rodrigo Naves at first, began to read these works through the lens of contemporary art and discovered values in these artists that were not merely artisanal, recognizing their unique authorial characteristics, not just repeating a tradition like in folklore, but inventing their own style—artists that truly needed to be understood with the tools of contemporary criticism,” concludes Mammì.
Timeline of Exhibitions Held in 2024 to Celebrate the 20th Anniversary of Galeria Estação:
Women by Women - February 22 – March 16
This group show featured 47 works honoring the legacy of Conceição dos Bugres, Elza de Oliveira Souza, Izabel Mendes da Cunha, Maria Auxiliadora Silva, Madalena dos Santos Reinbold, Mirian Inêz da Silva Cerqueira, Zica Bérgami, and Noemisa Batista dos Santos.
Renato Rios – The Elephant and the Sapphire - March 25 – April 30
The first solo exhibition of Renato Rios at Galeria Estação occupied two spaces with a series of interconnected paintings that reflected the artist's dreamlike, figurative, and abstract poetics.
East of Eden - May 7 – June 8
This group exhibition proposed dialogues between the pictorial poetics of Júlio Martins da Silva, Paulo Pasta, and Pedro Figari, revisiting the partnership between Galerias Estação and Millan. Curated by Antonio Gonçalves Filho, the show presented 35 canvases simultaneously to the public in both exhibition spaces in São Paulo, making it one of the highlights of the 20th anniversary celebrations of Galeria Estação.
The Dance of Myths – Ogwa and Salmi, Grandfather and Granddaughter - June 18 – July 17
The first international exhibition at Galeria Estação featured works by Ogwa and Salmi López Balbuena, prominent figures in Paraguayan indigenous art. Curated by Fredi Casco and Fernando Allen, with a catalog by critic Ticio Escobar, the exhibition established generational connections preserved through the cosmogony, rites, and myths of the Ishir people via drawings and acrylic paintings.
André Ricardo - LightFallen - August 6 – October 5
O que resta: arte e crítica de arte The second solo exhibition of the São Paulo artist at Galeria Estação. Curated by Igor Simões, the show reaffirmed poetic dialogues with the work of Rubem Valentim (1912 – 1991), a Bahian sculptor, painter, and engraver, who was featured in a joint exhibition with André Ricardo’s works presented in London.
About Lorenzo Mammì
Born in Italy in 1957, Mammì graduated in Literary Studies from the University of Florence and holds a doctorate in Philosophy from the University of São Paulo (USP). He has lived in Brazil since 1987. From 1989 to 2002, he taught History of Music in the Department of Music at USP and has been a professor of Medieval Philosophy at FFLCH/USP since 2003. As an art and music critic, he has published numerous essays in specialized magazines, catalogs, and anthologies, including O que resta: arte e crítica de arte, What Remains: Art and Art Criticism (Companhia das Letras, 2012), focusing on visual arts. In A fugitive, The Fugitive (Companhia das Letras, 2017), he compiled essays on music discussing composers such as Mozart, Rossini, Wagner, Debussy, and Villa-Lobos. He is the author of the monographs Volpi (Cosac e Naify, 1999) and Carlos Gomes (Folha Explica, 2001). He translated Confissões de Santo Agostinho, Confessions of Saint Augustine into Portuguese (Companhia das Letras, 2017). From September 1999 to March 2005, he was the director of the Maria Antonia University Center (USP) in São Paulo. Since 2015, he has been the chief curator of Programming and Events at the Instituto Moreira Salles (São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Poços de Caldas).
About Galeria Estação
With one of the pioneering and most important collections in the country, Galeria Estação, opened in late 2004 by Vilma Eid and Roberto Eid Philipp, has become known for revealing and promoting Brazilian non-erudite art. Its role has been crucial in integrating this form of expression into the contemporary art circuit by publishing works and organizing solo and group exhibitions under the guidance of leading curators and critics in Brazil. The gallery's roster, which has gained visibility in specialized media, is also making strides internationally by participating in exhibitions like Histoire de Voir at the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain in France in 2012, and the Between Two Seas Biennial – São Paulo | Valencia in Spain in 2007. A notable example of this international presence was the solo exhibition of Véio – Cícero Alves dos Santos in Venice during the Art Biennale in 2013. In Brazil, in addition to solo exhibitions and prestigious group shows, the gallery's artists have their works in the collections of significant collectors and esteemed institutions such as the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, the Museum of Art São Paulo, the Afro Brazil Museum (SP), the Pavilion of Brazilian Cultures (SP), the Itaú Cultural Institute (SP), SESC São Paulo, the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro, and MAR in Rio de Janeiro.
BOOK TECHNICAL SHEET
Title: Moderno Contemporâneo Popular Brasileiro: the Vision of Vilma Eid
Authors: Nelson Kon, Lorenzo Mammì, Germana Monte-Mór, and Daniel Rangel?Publisher: WMF Martins Fontes
Number of Pages: 320
Year: August 2024
ISBN: 978-85-469-0653-6
Cover Type: Hard cover
Format: 17 x 24 cm
Price: R$ 199
SERVICE
Metamorphoses and Distances?When: November 7, 2024 – January 31, 2025
Where: Galeria Estação
Address: Rua Ferreira Araújo, 625 - Pinheiros, São Paulo
Gallery Hours: Monday to Friday, 11 AM to 7 PM; Saturday, 11 AM to 3 PM; closed on Sundays
Phone: 11 3813-7253
Email: contato@galeriaestacao.com.br
Website: www.galeriaestacao.com.br
Instagram: @galeriaestacao
Press Inquiries:?Baobá Comunicação, Cultura e Conteúdo
Erika Balbino: (11) 98223-1561 / João Jacques: (11) 99607-0994
