SP-ARTE . ROTAS 2026: LUIZA GOTTSCHALK . MATIAS DUVILLE . RAFAEL CHAVEZ . ZÉ CARLOS GARCIA

Casa Triângulo participates in the Rotas fair with a presentation that brings together Luiza Gottschalk, the new artist represented by the gallery, Rafael Chavez, Matías Duville, and Zé Carlos Garcia.

This participation coincides with important institutional projects by the artists: Matías Duville represents Argentina at the 61st Venice Biennale, while Rafael Chavez participates this year in the Panorama of Brazilian Art at MAM São Paulo. In the Mirante sector of Rotas, curated by Bernardo Mosqueira, the gallery also presents works by Antonio Henrique Amaral, Matías Duville, Zé Carlos Garcia, and Rafael Chavez.

A first reaction to Luiza Gottschalk’s paintings is the feeling of energy in motion. Unsurprisingly, as the artist’s first passion was dance and later, theatrical performance. The choreography of movement in the act of painting itself produces results in flowing gestural brushstrokes, using dense or subtle color: fluctuating, evanescent, rhythm betraying secrets within.

Mysterious figures, human and animal, suggested or hinted at, populate imaginary landscapes retained from memories or dreams. Many recall her childhood away from urban centers, in the Mantiqueira mountain range, a bucolic country environment between Minas Gerais and São Paulo. Each painting reflects inner peace, or turbulence, emoting powerful personal agitation or tranquility. Paint is poured, applied with definitive brushstrokes, and sometimes parts of the canvas are dyed by submersion. Gottschalk thus creates images that are mostly undefined, but that awaken our deepest feelings, emotions accumulated over time, hidden, which return vividly to the surface.

Tang, Sarina. Troposphere Shared - Artists Brazil China, Andrea Jakobsson Estúdio, 2024

Interested in the use of physical and mental displacement as ways to change reference and perception, Matias Duville places himself in different situations in order to understand how he and his work transform one another. His charcoal, ink and mud drawings proposes parallel realities and debates on landscape and chaos. For him, the act of drawing goes beyond: it means being attentive to any accident or loss of control; it is self-knowledge. “Too much comfort is not good”, declares the artist who mounted a mobile studio in Alaska to create a series of drawings linked to the imagination, to the physical and intellectual permeation of nature and memory. He often visits a piece of land art he created in the hinterlands of Argentina to understand external and internal mutations. His life in the studio is linked to moments of trial and error, of mastery and loss. Drawing is a powerful window, and because of this, when he is creating, he expands mental geography, entering a hypnotic state that leads him to the many dimensions he elaborates. His workspace is the mind itself. 

Beta Germano. Workspaces of Latin American Artists. Publisher Cobogó/Act., 2019

Public collections: Blanton Museum, Austin, USA; Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio, Modena, Italy; Fundación ARCO, Madrid, Spain; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, León, Spain; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Rosario, Rosario, Argentina; Museo de Arte de Lima, Lima, Peru; Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, USA; MoMA, New York, USA; Patricia Cisneros Collection, New York, USA; Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York, USA; Tate Modern, London, England and Tiroche De León Collection, Jaffa, Israel.

Rafael Chavez is a self-taught visual artist from the Caatinga, in the hinterlands of Paraíba, in Santa Luzia, in the Vale do Sabugi region, an archaeological cradle with over 25 sites cataloged by IPHAN. Her artistic journey is marked by the diversity of materials and forms of expression, influenced from an early age by the educational environment of his mother, a pedagogue, where she lived until she was 18. This rich context of diversity fueled his curiosity and desire to experiment with different media, including oil and acrylic painting, watercolor, digital painting, animation, sculpture, video art, and music.

Chavez’s works transcend simple visual representation, exploring intersections between body, landscape, spirituality, and territory. Her production celebrates the vitality of the northeastern hinterland and the dynamics of rural life, which have permeated his artistic research process without stereotypes, alongside the mysteries and archaeological possibilities of the Caatinga forest. The expression of queer and deviant bodies is also one of the guiding threads of her work, challenging predefined norms of identity and authenticity.

Rafael Chavez’s work celebrates diversity in all forms of expression. Each piece is a portal for deeper understandings of existence in a diverse universe. Her works highlight contemporary issues of identity, resistance, and transformation, reflecting her personal experiences and the rich cultural heritage of the “sertão nordestino”. Chavez’s art transforms the complexities of existence into vibrant euphoria, challenging the viewer to rethink normative standards and stereotypes.

Public collections: Jorge M. Pérez Collection / El Espacio 23, Miami, USA; Museu de Arte Contemporânea do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil and Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Zé Carlos Garcia studied sculpture at the School of Fine Arts of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, attended the Visual Arts School at Parque Lage. Zé Carlos Garcia’s sculptures present themselves as uncanny shapeshifters that can recombine their members to conjure up different species of insect, or transform pieces of furniture by cloaking them in plumage. This adding-on creates hybrids that not only preserve the meanings of their constituent parts, but also generate morbid curiosities out of distortions of their natures. Garcia seems to want to evince a certain perversity in his audience, caught somewhere between revulsion and fascination, playing on their voyeurism before such mangled bodies, however fictional they may be. The possibility of recreating the world through forms initially established by Aesthetics, that is, not proposed as “given” by nature, impelled him into a line of research that led to the sculptural construction of “birds”, the redefinition of “insects” and the “busts” sculpted from sedimentary stones that do not have a definite shape. The symbolism of the discourses of power that mark the construction of the history of humanity is also present in Zé Garcia’s research, as in the “busts”, with his notion of ephemerality and ruin, and in the horsehair flags and wooden stakes which refer us to masts, equestrian sculptures and obelisks, landmarks of conquest and narratives of territories. The “construction” of his work originates from existing bodies, sometimes dead, static, found, natural or artificial, and generates objects – beings – under the sign of sculpture. Parts and fragments of antique furniture associated with carnival plumes and feathers are arranged to create hybrids with aesthetic and allegorical power. His sculptures go in the opposite direction to the works created for posterity and executed in consistent materials, dialoguing with the dimension of eternity and ruin, with the construction of an ideal and the loss of power. The artist therefore suggests a discussion with the body as centerpiece – be it animal, human or sculptural – and experience as voluntary action that alters the landscape, undergoing constant morphological change, also through the addition of new elements.

Mirante is a section of SP-Arte Rotas featuring an exhibition curated by the fair’s artistic director, bringing together outstanding works presented by participating galleries. In this edition, around seventy works produced over more than a century by more than fifty artists from Brazil and across Latin America invite us to question and expand the very idea of landscape, revealing the extraordinary diversity of ways of living, knowing, feeling, imagining, and creating the world that characterizes the continent’s artistic production.

The works gathered here approach landscape in remarkably different ways. Rather than treating it as a genre of artistic representation, they present it as a field of imagination and reflection on the relationships between beings and their environments. Far from reducing landscape to a mere backdrop for human action, these works portray the earth, water, the city, the countryside, the forest, the night, dreams, animals, and human beings as equally vital agents participating in shared worlds. Gradually, landscape ceases to be the representation of a space observed from afar and instead challenges the very notion of distance, affirming relationships of continuity, interdependence, and coexistence among different forms of life.

When we stand before a landscape, we are confronted above all with our own ways of perceiving. We may ask not only what it reveals, but also what it renders imperceptible. At a time marked by the intensifying climate crisis and the growing concentration of power and resources, questioning landscape also means questioning the modern assumptions that have led us to this critical moment. This selection of works seeks to encourage reflection on the ways we have learned to separate nature from culture, humanity from the world, and self from other. Ultimately, recognizing ourselves as part of the Earth may also require imagining how the Earth perceives itself.

Bernardo Mosqueira

Artistic Director, SP-Arte Rotas

Antonio Henrique Amaral brought a singular voice to Brazilian and Latin American art of the second half of the 20th century. Born in 1935, he was part of the generation that came into its own under the authoritarian rule of the military dictatorship installed in Brazil in 1964, having produced some of the most incisive allegories from that period. His visceral work dealt with political violence, existential discontent and erotic desire with the same intensity. His experimental approach challenged hackneyed lemmas concerning chromatic composition, the treatment of surfaces and stylistic cohesion. His blend of visceral attitude with experimental daring makes him not only a key figure in the history of Brazilian and Latin American art, but also an influential artist for the young generations that defy normativities and authoritarianisms.

Public collections: Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas, USA; Art Museum of the Americas, Washington D.C., USA; Rhode Island Museum, Providence, USA; Makurasaki Museum, Makurasaki, Japan; Essex Collection of Art from Latin American, Colchester, England; Casa de las Americas, Havana, Cuba; Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende, Santigo, Chile; Museo de Arte Americana, Maldonado, Uruguay; Museo de Arte Moderno de Mexico, Mexico City, Mexico; El Colegio de Mexico, Mexico City, Mexico; Collección FEMSA, Monterrey, Mexico; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, Monterrey, Mexico; Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogota, Bogota, Colombia; Moseo Rayo, Roldanillo, Colombia; Museo Nacional de Arte, La Paz, Bolivia; Museo Vial Bogarin, El Tigre, Venezuela; Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje, Macedonia; Instituto Inhotim, Brumadinho, Brazil; Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, São Paulo, Brazil; Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; Museu de Arte Brasileira, São Paulo, Brazil; Instituto Itaú Cultural, São Paulo, Brazil; Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; among others.