Between July 27 and September 28, Galeria Refresco presents the group exhibition “Bronze Noturno”, curated by Daniela Avellar, Deborah Zapata, and Renato Canivello. The show features more than twenty works by Brazilian artists from diverse regions who have gained recognition for their unique practices and processes, expanding the conventional boundaries of painting and sculpture. The exhibition’s title evokes the sensation of warmth on the skin after sun exposure—a lingering presence of the sun even in the absence of its direct light. This quintessentially Carioca experience highlights a twilight element in the exhibition, marked by the chromatic gradients of the works and the unusual processes and media employed in their creation. It is also an attempt to map not only a visual repertoire, such as the sunsets in Rio de Janeiro, but also the very question of the body’s sensitivity—topics that are deeply significant to Brazilian art.
The thirteen artists featured in the exhibition are Alexandre Nitzsche Cysne, Dani Cavalier, Edu de Barros, Eduardo Baltazar, Fabio Severino, Gpeto, Iah Bahia, Medusa, Nathalie Ventura, Rafael D’Aló (based in London), Sandra Lapage, Siwaju, and Ygor Landarin. Their use and combination of unconventional materials in painting and sculptural practices—such as metals, acrylic, resin, clay, and lycra—highlight the experimental nature of their work and their focus on the tangibility of the pieces. “Bronze Noturno” revives questions inherent to contemporary art and proposes new ways of thinking about the dynamics between form and materiality, content and enclosure, reflection and representation.
As Daniela Avellar notes, “the curatorship reflects on an experience of the city through its streets, crossroads, flows and counterflows, encounters, and affections—all mediated by the relationship with the sky and the sun, and the meeting of these effects with the skin.” “Bronze Noturno” proposes an artistic sensibility that prioritizes bodily experience over mere visual contemplation. Here, the skin emerges as the threshold between the world and the body—the border from which we establish ourselves as individuals and perceive our surroundings. In this sense, Rio de Janeiro’s iconographies also take on significance in the exhibition, as the place where the body resides and is shaped. The impression of the nocturnal bronze, after all, reinterprets how we perceive the dichotomy of presence and absence—like a hallucination, it is a sensation that persists in the absence of its correlating object.
