As cascas da lua [The Moon’s Peels] are hiding places for Cida.

Cida was Matheus Chiaratti’s great-aunt.

Cida was like the moon of Birigui, when its silvery light falls upon the dark paths.

Cida was a rural nymph, another in exile, wandering.

One day, toward the end of her life, Cida chose the bronze of bodies embracing beneath the fragility of withering flowers.

As cascas da lua is an exhibition of relics: the tablecloth, the shroud, the burial cloth illuminated with arabesques, blossoms, dresses, lovers, mirrors, the bread upon the cloths, the church and desire, the garden of childhood and death, the light that etches faces into the silver salts of the photo that speaks of the past, and a flower in her hair, a green gown like the jungles, like the woods, like the gardens.

Cida rests in it, her Marilyn-like body outlined down to her arm, which falls over her waist like the waters of a Niagara, gently in memory.

As cascas da lua is also a system of offerings, an alibi of things to honor memory or repair the past: here is the sacred place of food, and the immense linen for no body, announcing the absence of all bodies.

There are small paintings and bouquets of flowers.

There are shoes for traversing the inscrutable space that separates us from childhood, or for leaping into the future; and, like an echo, there are Cida’s shoes from when she walked through the garden of her desires: to become one with another, and to become someone else.

Toward the end of her life – Matheus tells me – Cida was able to buy a bronze cast by Rodin: it depicts an embrace, L’emprise or le péché, dominion or sin; belonging to another and, at the same time, making oneself vulnerable. 

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I wonder: why do we always seek the improbable future in the garden of childhood?

Matheus Chiaratti laid out the coordinates of a hortus conclusus, a garden enclosed within memory, making Cida the star and the beacon of this cultivation.

A scenography of fragments, necessarily scattered, like any reliquary; in As cascas da lua, the incessant absence of the bodies that life separates is repeated.

Cida and her lovers. Who we once were and what is yet to come.

Matheus Chiaratti broke his ankle while preparing this exhibition. Oedipus’s swollen foot came to mind. Not the light, feathered foot of Hermes the messenger. Matheus thus returns to the garden we have lost, to the wordless time of childhood.

And then, language will emerge to mark the distances, the abysses, the separation, the pain.

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To mark with its sound the absence of what once was.

I recall Lygia Clark, who had broken her wrist and who, by inflating the pouch that was healing it with the air from her breath, was able to find a way for a small stone to sink and reemerge as a new birth.

Stone and air.

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Moon and skin of light, the moon’s crust that illuminates the path of the past in the night: immobilized by his broken ankle, Matheus Chiaratti also found the relational path to be able to exist, fragment by fragment, like an utterance that recomposes itself at the source of what had been forgotten, in the ceaseless, impossible place of birth.

Luis Pérez-Oramas

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INFO

The Moon's Peels

Opening: 27 June 2026

Until 15 August 2026

Quadra

Rua Barão de Tatuí, 521, São Paulo