The UNFINISHED world

Two sets of works with coinciding features compose Chiasma, a solo exhibition by Fernanda Valadares at Galeria Ocre. These are works from the Backrooms series—a cohesive, square, concrete body—and from A queda do céu [The Falling Sky] series, which in some way counter balance their hardness. The artist works with the ancient technique of encaustic, using marine plywood as a substrate, and the images she creates through these media are clean and balanced. They invite the senses, allowing the mind to step aside. It would be possible to view them without asking questions. However, whoever chooses to be intrigued by their titles (words are rarely innocent) or by their compositional details—including the coherent horizon line and its mathematical relationship to the other lines—will find themselves in a less comfortable place. The design of calculated lines and the laborious layers of wax and paint responsible for their execution usually honor time, which occupies a key place as both motif and method in the artist's output. What happens in Chiasma (crossing/intersection) is that this time becomes scrambled. This is because the works point toward different rhythms of the world, toward modes of dreaming that are mutually incompatible, and toward the fatal attachment to the nightmare that occupies the imaginary of the Capitalocene.

The Backrooms series refers to a cyclical time of eternal return, which, although it might emulate something akin to a contemporary mythology, in no way projects the sacred or weaves a cosmogonic narrative. These liminal spaces, operating between the unknown and the familiar, are like self-contained cubes—without escape, without relief, without purpose. And as often happens with spaces from which the human figure is absent, it is humanity—or a portion of it—that is mirrored in every corner of these structures. In the Backrooms—environments named after an internet creepypasta legend—the labyrinthine tone is linked to disorientation, even if the settings are not truly foreign to us. They are pathways that seduce through the curiosity of discovering what comes next, yet exhaust themselves in their sole potentiality: a hollow promise. Like a cross-section of the world engineered by what was once brutally called civilization, the Backrooms lack the four elements that sustain life on our planet; they isolate access to these elements to the same extent that they offer the illusion of an escape.

However, the Backrooms created by Fernanda Valadares feature infiltrations. A kind of greenish organic matter creeps along the crevices and corners like a foreign body. Beyond this, the "smudges" on the surfaces of the image—which speak to the material (wax) and method (heat) used in encaustic—are irregularities serving as reminders that these 80 x 80 cm Backrooms are, first and foremost, works of art. And as such, they do not shy away from the desire for a greater dream—one that understands the nightmare as a healing process for that which surpasses us and subsequently invents a chance to dream in a positive light.

The horizon, a regular presence in the artist's oeuvre, manifests in Chiasma as if offering solace. In A queda do céu I—an imposing polyptych over three meters wide—we see blocks, perhaps transported from the Backrooms, symmetrically positioned within a simplified landscape formed by a ground plane, hills, and a vast sky. Here, however, these structures are translucent, acquiring the color of the environment in which they are embedded: earthy on the ground, green on the hills, and light in the sky. While they receive, with force and beauty, the permeability foreshadowed in the infiltrations of the Backrooms, they are one-way streets: blocks that absorb a landscape while offering in return only an imposed presence in an unequal relationship.

The name A queda do céu is not accidental; its meaning has become known to the white world through the words of the Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa, published in the book bearing that title. It refers to a "plummet into chaos" resulting from the destruction of the forest by white people, among many other destructions. In A queda do céu II, the work that closes the exhibition, human construction disappears, leaving only what preceded it. But this horizon appears as if seen through a window—perhaps a mirage for those who manage to see through the walls of the Backrooms. Perhaps the civilized world, in crisis and flirting with collapse, is about to end; or perhaps there is a chance to dream it as a new world, still unfinished.