Wanda Pimentel @ Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, Rio de Janeiro - Path in black and white / Percurso em preto e branco

Wanda Pimentel 

Path in black and white  

Percurso em preto e branco

Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, Rio de Janeiro

August 16 — October 25, 2025

Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel presents Wanda Pimentel – Percurso em preto e branco [Path in black and white], at Carpintaria, Rio de Janeiro, marking the first exhibition of the artist’s work in her native Rio de Janeiro since her passing in 2019. The show brings together the Animais series, a group of early black-and-white drawings for the first time. Created between 1965 and 1967, this body of work offers rare insight into a formative period of experimentation, marking the emergence of Pimentel’s distinct visual language.

Using anxious, vigorous lines and a restricted palette, Wanda Pimentel drew animals, some identifiable, others invented, whose forms pulse, meander, and buzz among graphic tangles of squiggles and markings. Beetles, kangaroos, armadillos, turtles, bats, giraffes, owls, and monkeys appear, rendered in an inquisitive hand, as if the artist were exploring the textures of fur, feathers, scales, and prints, only to distort their shapes and patterns into the hallucinatory environments of her stylized bestiary.

This earlier facet of Pimentel’s oeuvre reveals a more unbound calligraphic approach, in which the surface of the paper is almost entirely occupied, bristling with visual activity, a sharp contrast to her later geometrically oriented output, which relied on a rigorous spatiality defined by empty space in tandem with hard-edged depictions of objects and limbs. As art historian Vera Beatriz Siqueira proposes in her essay for the exhibition, “In Wanda, animals seem to affirm the graphic basis and central position afforded to the line, defining issues in her oeuvre, while simultaneously heralding the thematic and plastic question of “involvement”, relationships between creatures, objects and their environments, central to her work

The artist’s Untitled (from the Envolvimento series) (1969) was recently included in the MoMA’s permanent collection and was featured in the exhibition Vital Signs: Artists and the Body, organized by Lanka Tattersall in 2024 at the same institution. Wanda Pimentel is currently on view in Pop Brasil: Avant-garde and New Figuration, 1960-70, at Pinacoteca in São Paulo, Brazil.

Artist Wanda Pimentel

Wanda Pimentel (1943–2019), born and based in Rio de Janeiro, developed a distinct artistic practice marked by precise geometric forms and smooth, hard-edge surfaces that blur the lines between abstraction and figuration. Her depictions of domestic interiors and everyday objects in the late 1960s and early 1970s emerged in parallel with Brazil’s military dictatorship. Her work responds to this repressive context, subtly critiquing the isolating effects of authoritarian rule, conservative social values, and fractured national identity. This sense of isolation also reflects the gendered constraints of Brazilian society and the country's peripheral role in global art discourse. Though visually resonant with Pop Art, Pimentel’s use of synthetic aesthetics carries a darker, more ambivalent tone, challenging the easy assimilation of industrial imagery typical of the genre’s Northern iterations. Wanda Pimentel has works in important public collections, such as MoMA – The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; MAC – Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói, Niterói, Brazil; MALBA – Museu Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina; MASP - Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, São Paulo, Brazil; MAM – Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

FORTES D'ALOIA & GABRIEL

Carpintaria, Rua Jardim Botânico 971, Rio de Janeiro

fdag.com.br

Xavier Veilhan @ Nara Roesler, Rio de Janeiro

Xavier Veilhan

Nara Roesler, Rio de Janeiro

September 10 - October 29, 2022

XAVIER VEILHAN 

Marine n° 1, 2 and 3, 2022

Birch plywood and acrylic paint

78.7 x 41.3 x 2 in each

© Courtesy of the artist and Nara Roesler

Nara Roesler presents Xavier Veilhan's first solo show in Rio de Janeiro. The exhibition offers a unique opportunity to see all-new works by a leading figure in French contemporary art, highlighting how his work explores the realms of two and three dimensionality, as well as exploring his particular interest in creating spaces and contexts that alter the experience of space and the perception of time.

On September 12 the cinematheque at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro (MAM Rio) hosted a screening, notably premiering Xavier Veilhan’s new short film titled, Le Film de l’Est, along with two other pieces by the artist, in dialogue with short-films by artists including Isabelle Cornaro, Carlos Adriano, Cris Miranda, Cao Guimaraes and Raul Mourao. The presentation was followed by a conversation between Xavier Veilhan, participating local artists, and head curator Keyna Eleison.

Xavier Veilhan (b. 1963, in Paris, France) is known for a body of work that ranges from sculpture, painting, installation, performance and video to photography. Integrating the collections of institutions such as the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, and having represented France at the Venice Biennale in 2017, his work pays homage to the inventions and inventors of our time through artistic language that intertwines industry and art. For the artist, art is “a visual tool through which we must look to understand our past, present and future”.

In 2022, invited by Virginie Viard to create the visual universe of the last two seasons of Chanel Haute Couture shows in Paris, Xavier Veilhan developed an installation that combines virtual and physical spaces with monumental geometric sculptures, mobiles and sculptural ‘wheels’. The latter pieces which consist of circular kinetic sculptures made of wood, entwine the visual poetics of the mobile and of the Cocardes, which are presented at Nara Roesler Rio de Janeiro alongside other works characteristic of his practice.

Xavier Veilhan also presents examples of his recent sculptural work, which is firmly rooted in the practice of portraiture. In this sense, famous personalities such as music producers Brian Eno, Quincy Jones, Rick Rubin and Tom Moulton, portrayed in the Producers series, or architects such as Le Corbusier and Richard Neutra for the Architectones project, as well as people close to the artist, such as close friends and studio assistants, give an emotional dimension to the work.

The process of making these figures incorporates traditional methods and materials combined with current technology. Xavier Veilhan scans the bodies of his subjects, to manipulate the image before its completion. Although the digital scan makes it possible to make a sculpture identical to the model, Xavier Veilhan operates, almost always, without the intention of achieving a faithful representation, but rather seeking to insert elements of the artificial, either through the geometry of the form, or by proposing effects that alter the viewer's natural vision of it. 

In this sense, Xavier Veilhan uses a wide variety of materials in his practice, notably including silver, solid wood, plywood and mineral mortar. The latter was recently used by the artist in order to minimize the environmental impacts of his work, a concern that also led him to use non-polluting varnish in the finishing of several pieces.

Finally, the exhibition includes works from the Marqueteries series, which capture images based on photographs of the artist's faceted sculptures. According to the artist, the works capture a tension between representation and the existence of the image as an object. Referring to the technique of marquetry, Xavier Veilhan resorts to a formal approach in which he uses chromatic surfaces – some of them opaque, others with visible wood grains –, which fit together and create the illusion of three-dimensionality with an impressive blend of both craftsmanship and technology.

On the occasion of the exhibition, Brazilian artist Lucia Koch interviews Xavier Veilhan, addressing the similarities between their respective artistic approaches, which have architecture and space as guiding concepts in their practice.

XAVIER VEILHAN

Since the mid–1980s, Xavier Veilhan has created an acclaimed body of works—sculpture, painting, installation, performance, video and photography—defined by his interest in both the vocabulary of modernity (speed, motion, urban life, etc.) and classical statuary, reinterpreted from a contemporary vision. His work pays tribute to the inventions and inventors of our modern times, through a formal artistic language that mixes the codes of both industry and art. He mixes a great variety of techniques and material to produce tridimensional portraits and landscapes, bestiaries and architectures that swing between the familiar and the extraordinary.

For Xavier Veilhan, art is ‘a vision tool through which we must look in order to understand our past, present, and future’. Frequently investing in public space, his exhibitions and in-situ interventions in cities, gardens and houses question our perception by creating an evolving space in which the audience becomes an actor. Their aesthetics reveal a continuum of form, contour, fixity and dynamics, that invite the spectator to a new reading of the space and so creating a whole repertory of signs, the theatre of a society.

NARA ROESLER

Rua Redentor 241, Ipanema 22421-030, Rio de Janeiro RJ

www.nararoesler.art