The true image of the past flashes by, swift. The past only allows itself to be fixed as an image that flashes, irreversibly, in the moment in which it is recognized.

Walter Benjamin

A lived event is finite. Whereas the remembered event is boundless, because it is just a key to everything that came before and after. It is through an affective and vernacular gaze that the stories of Etel Carmona, David Almeida and Alberto da Veiga Guignard intertwine in the Casa Zalszupin, imbued by the architectural power of its space. Through paintings, sculptures and furniture, they reconstruct the latent Brazilianness of the interior of the country.

The landscape that inhabits the exhibited works is born before the image itself is even recognized by the mind. It awakens in a deep and intimate way, until it gains space to sprout outside of our bodies, materializing itself before our eyes. Thus is also the poetics developed by the triad that occupies the different environments that make up the construction, located in the heart of Jardim América, in São Paulo.

Etel Carmona's inspiration is born in the countryside and develops through it. The nature that inhabits her inner world gains space and interpretations from her hands. The craft is her guide and the means with which she builds what surrounds her. A self-taught artist born in the interior of Minas Gerais, Etel found wood as her primordial raw material. In connection with the natural universe for over two decades, she works in harmony with sustainable management, linked to the teachings of indigenous peoples. In this intimate coexistence with the earth, textures, shapes and joints are born, which she develops and applies with excellence. The iconography of deep Brazil permeates her work, from the blooms of maria-sem-vergonha to the ox cart, always superimposed on the dreamlike landscapes, scenes that were captured with praise by Guignard and also by David Almeida in the same regions.

Guignard liked to say that he "painted what he saw," but, like David, all of this vision transformed into paint was always filtered through the lenses of imagination - an instrumentalization of the encounter between the pictorial and memory. The landscapes that live in David's imagination and that make up this conversation begin to reveal themselves first by being carved into pieces of found jatobá. Each section traveled on the wood becomes a fragment, which is then revealed with earthy colors, which bloom in light and shadow. Much of the series was made in the south of Minas Gerais, specifically in São Bento do Sapucaí, the city where Etel built her current refuge. It was near there, in Pindamonhangaba, that Etel spent part of her adolescence and where David approached landscape painting and found the windows that would lead him to the blossoming of this scenario in an artistic way. The subjectivity that composes his works is born from this place of memory, from the attempt to explode a space of belonging, to confront painting from an affective bias.

It was also from affectivity that the floating and fantastic landscapes sprouted for which Guignard won the world and that now intertwine in this narrative. Figuration is only a support for the pure aesthetic emotion that is wrapped in his paintings. References from his visual field take on an ethereal touch, making us doubt if such scenes could actually exist. Despite being considered part of the second modernism, he walked a unique path and little linked to the artistic movements of Brazil at the time. Jorge Zalszupin was also like this, who, with his sensual and modern architecture, remained distant from fashions, thus creating a unique and recognizable style for his productions, including furniture.

A long-time friend of Etel Carmona, Zalszupin shared with her a love of craftsmanship, nature and simplicity. It is natural, then, that the friend's pieces and processes would naturally find a sure place in environments of the house in which Zalszupin and his family lived for so many decades. It is the transmission of such a legacy that transforms experience into experience. And it is in this way that such experience is enhanced and fortified, using the union of these vernacular tentacles of creation.

Ana Carolina Ralston
curator