Between Revolution and Revolt

Tadeu Chiarelli

Translated by Tamara Zambiasi

Carmela Gross’s exhibition, Almost a Circus, has a certain opacity that invites us to pause and think about what the objects and installations on display might reveal. With its dense, layered works, the exhibition steers clear of the “fast-food” style of shows that have become so common today. Almost a Circus stands apart from the many “engaged” exhibitions flooding the city’s art spaces, filled with works that focus solely on emphasizing the obvious, at the expense of more complex poetic and political dimensions. In this way, Almost a Circus feels like a much-needed antidote to the mediocrity that has crept into the city’s art scene.

The first reflection sparked by the exhibition concerns the place where it is held: the Sesc Pompeia, one of São Paulo’s most emblematic spaces. Designed by the Italian-Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, Sesc Pompeia – conceived in the 1970s and opened in 1982 – has, since its inauguration, symbolized a bold vision for the future of the city and the country, a landmark of architecture committed to the regeneration of Brazil as a democratic nation.

I don’t see the presence of Carmela’s works in such a symbolic space as a harmonious blend of her poetics and Lina’s. On the contrary, for me, what amplifies the power of Almost a Circus is the tension between the confidence in the future that Lina envisioned in that space and the commitment to the present, embodied in Carmela’s works, which frame it as the perfect stage for rebellion.

It is as if Lina, with Sesc Pompeia, thrust life forward into the future, while Carmela constantly reminds us that we will hardly have a future unless transformation happens now, in the urgency of the present.

While the Sesc Pompeia building expresses confidence in the future, Carmela’s pieces and interventions make it clear that if rebellion does not erupt, our contemporaneity will remain trapped in an eternal present, violent and inescapable.

Unlike Lina, who envisioned a revolutionary architecture aiming for utopia, Carmela’s pieces and installations acknowledge that we are already living in a dystopia – here and now. Her works do not advocate for revolution, as Lina’s do, but rather for rebellion, for the immediate transformation of the present (it is no coincidence that the exhibition leans heavily into red tones, even in works like THE BLACK WOMAN [A NEGRA], from 1997).

Another aspect the exhibition presents, which in some ways expands and complements the first, is that despite being composed of objects, prints, projections, and installations, Almost a Circus is, at its core, drawing.

Drawing has always defined Carmela Gross’s poetics: an artist who articulates her stance on reality through the foundation of graphic elements and their visible extrapolations, both in her two-dimensional works and in the expanded forms of her three-dimensional pieces and installations.

What is that “impenetrable” BIG WHEEL [RODA GIGANTE] (2019/2024), if not a drawing in space, lines whose destination (or origin) lies in the ruins of a city that is, at once, construction and dismantling? BIG WHEEL is a fundamental work for re-politicizing – through a different perspective – what has conventionally been called “participatory art.”

And what is WOOD RIVER [RIO MADEIRA] (1990/2024), if not a series of lines formed by red and green strokes on the ground – bordering the reflecting pool – a “straight-undulating” drawing? And RED LADDERS [ESCADAS VERMELHAS] (2012/2024) – light-lines in space?

Carmela’s works embody the very affirmation of graphic art within contemporary art: point and line/stroke and smudge. With this restricted set of elements (sometimes imbued with color, sometimes not), the artist engages with reality, dismantling and reconfiguring it.

It might seem strange to assert that Carmela’s work, in theory, denies the projective efficacy of art, while at the same time stating that her entire body of work is drawing. How can her works, being drawings, doubt the future? Isn’t it pure drawing itself a promise of becoming?

When Carmela creates her neon works, the use of light ends up damming (not annihilating, but containing) the projective nature that characterizes all drawing, as the light transforms the lines into pulsating forms, forms that deliberately blur the objectivity of the strokes from which they originated. An example is LUZ DEL FUEGO III (2018/2024), a luminous blot filled with meanings that pulse to their own rhythm.

Beautifully designed and presented, the standout piece in the exhibition for me is GANG [BANDO] (2016/2024): green blotches printed on zinc sheets, set within a striking corridor made of red plywood. What are these blotches? Are they clouds, imaginary continents? Are they silhouettes of monsters or animals?

Walking through that red corridor, evoking a city constantly under construction and demolition, reveals that while the neon lights pulse in other works and installations in the exhibition, the forms in GANG’s prints also pulse, always on the threshold between the recognizable and the unrecognizable.

On the other hand, it would be impossible to walk among those engraved forms without remembering the immense effort Carmela put into achieving that result. In those prints on zinc are traces of her earlier works: STAMPS [CARIMBOS], from the late 1970s, PROJECT FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OF A SKY [PROJETO PARA CONSTRUÇÃO DE UM CÉU] from 1983, QUASARS [QUASARES] from 1983, HOLES [BURACOS] from the 1990s, and many other pieces where systems of representation deliberately lose their objectivity. These works are also pure potential, clear indications of the need to revolt against the established, against what has already been systematized.

To conclude these comments, I emphasize that the political dimension of Carmela’s work, as seen in Almost a Circus, is in no way contained in a message for which each artwork serves merely as a vehicle. On the contrary, the political nature of her work arises from the intertwining of her artistic poetics with the visual and plastic craft she brings to the conception and execution of each piece.

Carmela’s works do not illustrate political themes; they are politics.