Installation Views
Overview
Casa Triângulo is pleased to present Quarto de não dormir, sala de não estar (Room Not to Sleep In, Room Not to Stay In), Thix’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, accompanied by a critical text by Maykson Cardoso. It is also the first exhibition in which the painter expands beyond painting into installation, ready-made, and sculptural practices as forms of expression. In the gallery’s “room not to stay in” — the non-place that every gallery inherently is, since no one truly inhabits them, but is always merely passing through — Thix rearranges the carcasses of furniture pieces: each fragment becomes part of a newly recomposed whole, theatrically constructing the dreamlike and unsettling atmosphere of a room not meant for sleep.
This setting forms the exhibition’s emotional and conceptual core, from which the public is led into the experience of the remaining works — all informed by the artist’s deeply unsettling biography: this room is also the one where a confined boy once dreamed of becoming the woman she is today. The pink dress she longed for as a child, yet was forbidden from wearing, multiplies itself not only throughout the paintings but also in the hanging garments suspended on racks. Everything in this exhibition thus becomes a kind of self-portrait; not only in the well-known narrative scenes in which the artist depicts herself, but also in the small camp paintings populated by invented trinkets functioning as “allegories of the self.”
Something similar emerges in her sculptures: her history shattered and reassembled. Reassembled not because the fragments are restored to their original form, but because they are granted a new configuration, another possible structure. A sheet of press-on nails is enlarged into a mobile resembling a DNA chain; an iron crinoline evokes a cage more than an undergarment support structure. Yet none of this is capable of containing the free woman who refuses to anchor her identity in biology and who asks, echoing a beautiful verse by Raquel Alves: “how to detach the copy from the model | if the animal mates | with the cage?”
From the very process of beginning a portrait through the grisaille — that is, from the “dead layer,” later covered with translucent glazes that produce the chiaroscuro contrasts characteristic of her painting — taking references from a painter of Artemisia Gentileschi’s stature (1593–1654), to the heavy furniture through which she re-constructs her room, Thix reactivates aspects of the Baroque aesthetic.
One of the defining marks of the Baroque was the sense of transience embodied in the motto memento mori — “remember that you will die” — often materialized through the imagery of the vanitas. In Thix’s work, however, transience acquires another meaning. If the artist reminds us of death — as in the painting where she holds her once-bearded head — it is to remind us that there may be many necessary deaths within a single life, and many possible lives after death. In other words, unlike Baroque artists who melancholically accepted inevitable finitude, Thix asserts here that one must fight — tooth and nail, with an open chest — for life.
*Fragments of the critical text for Thix's exhibition,
“Quarto de não dormir, sala de não estar”, at Casa Triângulo.
For the full text, click the link below.
