Shadow and Smoke: Artur Ferreira and Matheus Chiaratti

 

The line that separates is also the line that unites. Bordering or connecting two points, it is this line that promotes encounters, stimulates interaction and creates spaces for sharing. Not coincidentally, this line unites the work of Artur Ferreira and Matheus Chiaratti. Their piece, O Andor, revisits one of the best-known and oldest myths about the origin of drawing while establishing the terms of their collaboration. In Book X of Institutio Oratoria, Quintilian suggests that the outline of shadows cast by bodies in sunlight is the most primitive form of drawing. Meanwhile, Pliny the Elder writes in Book 35 of Naturalis Historia that Cora, the daughter of a potter from Sicyon named Butades, traced the outline of the shadow of a boy she was in love with on the wall to preserve his image and ease her longing for him. In Andor, Artur traces Matheus's shadow onto fabric and vice versa, and then sews these silhouettes onto a slightly darker fabric. The emphasis on the line—drawn and sewn—as not just a graphic mark, but also a poetic gesture that denies geometric rectitude and recognizes the other, suggests a rejection of modern rationalism, which is based on the pretentious idea of achieving accuracy and objectivity. Conversely, the work of Ferreira and Chiaratti is characterized by an organic and sensual line that is imperfect and ever-changing, not only because it is erotic when traversing desire and the forces of creation, but also because it is based on the relativity of the senses.

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The title of the exhibition, “Time Smoking the Painting,” refers to a drawing by the British artist William Hogarth, created in 1764. In the drawing, the old god Cronos, with a beard and huge wings, sits on fragments of ancient statues and smokes a huge painting with a pipe. Nothing can be seen of the painting except smoke and a frame that limits it pointlessly. This work is an allegory of time's ability to disintegrate everything, creating shadows and rejecting the materiality of bodies, while also serving as a gateway to other works. On one side is Feira do Cadouço by Artur Ferreira: wax fruits modelled over lemons that evoke time's effect on classic still lifes and remind us of life’s fleeting nature. They also recall ancient wax death masks that sought to immortalize the features of the deceased. Conversely, Beba Crush by Matheus Chiaratti seems to bring together, like relics, the arrows that struck the body of Saint Sebastian or those kept in Cupid's arsenal. Like smoke, the works speak of presence and absence in their own way, through the mold that preserves a vanished existence and the relic that connects us to a lost body.

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This interplay of presence and absence is re-enacted in the works presented in the exhibition through the relationship between the erotic and the necrotic, life and death, and desire and mourning. This relationship is manifested in wax skin, a form of material drawing practiced by Ferreira, and in the clay arrow, a form of aerial drawing practiced by Chiaratti. This relationship is also updated in Bum!, another work created by the duo. This photograph engages with the Italian artistic tradition of the stecchito, evident from Andrea Mantegna's renowned Lamentation over the Dead Christ (1475–1478) to Giuseppe Sanmartino's Veiled Christ (1753). Here, the concepts of erasure, annotation, and stain emerge as a counterpoint to the nearly scientific sterility of the veil covering the immobile body. Handwritten handkerchiefs rest on the body, combining to form a visual poem that tends towards abstraction. Here, we find an exercise in reconciling shadow and smoke, two potentially contradictory substances, formulated in the question: How can the other be apprehended? How to access the other? How to traverse the other? Perhaps the answer, always escaping like smoke, can only be found through drawing.

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São Paulo, July 2025​

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Renato Menezes is an art historian and curator at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo.

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INFO

Time Smoking a Picture - a duo show with Artur Ferreira

Opening: 26 July 2025

Until 9 August 2025

25M | Galeria Metrópole, Av. São Luís, 187, sala 25, São Paulo

©2024 by Matheus Chiaratti.