Galeria Estação announces the representation of the artist Suanê’s estate during the 2025 edition of SP-Arte. Born Lucia de Barros Carvalho, Suanê adopted this name during her adolescence, after receiving it from a shaman of the Fulni-ô indigenous people from Águas Belas, state of Pernambuco. She was the great-aunt of Tunga and was married to the painter Nelson Nóbrega. The body of work Suanê developed over seven decades is still to be fully discovered, as her public recognition has so far been less than her significance in the debates on modern and contemporary art in Brazil.
Suanê's artistic activity was intermittent, with small production pauses, from the mid-1940s to 2020. Over this time, her work took on various forms of relating the material world to a cosmic dimension of life. This characteristic can be traced from the early stages of her career, where she alternated between religious scenes, still life, and portraits. In the late 1980s, Suanê dedicated herself to a series of paintings suggesting visions of the sky and the universe.
In the later years of her career, between 2006 and 2019, the artist began to cut and pierce the surface of her works, introducing holes into the material. She incorporated fabrics, ropes, wood, plastic, and metal sheets into her processes, suggesting a desire to create works without limits—capable of enveloping both the materials and the surrounding space in their physical composition, while alluding to the cosmos and the immeasurability of the universe through this ordinary materiality—through the forms, colors, textures, and shine of its elements. Suanê’s first exhibition at Galeria Estação is expected to take place between April and July this year, curated by Ivo Mesquita.
With these new developments, Estação has curated a selection of works by both historical and contemporary artists for its booth at this year’s SP-Arte. In addition to Suanê, the exhibition will showcase pieces by Cardosinho, Itamar Julião, Deni Lantz, and Renato Rios. The collection includes rare works that have not been publicly displayed in years, as well as recent pieces that have never been shown before.
From Cardosinho, the gallery is presenting a group of paintings of landscapes in Rio de Janeiro, created between the early 1930s and the mid-1940s. In these works, Cardosinho’s skill as an untrained yet self-taught artist is remarkable, constructing his images based on engravings and photographs found in books, newspapers, magazines, and postcards. This is the source of the meticulous yet free, unguarded quality of his representations.
Known for his depictions of animals, Itamar Julião is represented in this selection with two vertical sculptures in which monkeys and jaguars are arranged within curved structures, evocative of branches and foliage. In both pieces, Julião’s craftsmanship is evident both in the carving of the volumes and in the details of the animals’ fur, the veins of the branches, and the veins of the leaves.
Among the contemporary artists represented, Estação is presenting, in this fair edition, paintings from the last two years of Renato Rios’s production. In these works, the artist continues his exploration of repetitions and variations, constructed from the serial arrangement of shapes and alternating colors between figure and background. The results generate vibrations and virtual movements on the surfaces, thus creating a kind of metaphysical geometry, infused with symbolism.
Finally, Deni Lantz’s recent work reveals the process of refinement through which his art has evolved. Since at least 2010, the artist has worked with a painting that is both atmospheric—airy, built through the application, scraping, and layering of paint on canvas or wood—and punctuated by marks that guide the surface of the work, particularly through the relationships established between these marks: proximities, distances, similarities, differences, and so on. In these foggy fields, the work sometimes suggests landscapes, other times still life, and at other times evokes visual rhythms, or an open set of ideas, actions, and meanings.
