There’s just one week left to visit the room where you can’t sleep and the living room where you can’t stay (from the title of the exhibition Quarto de não dormir, sala de não estar), conceived and realized by visual artist Thix (Porto Alegre, 1982). With her first exhibition at Casa Triângulo in São Paulo, Brazil, the artist channels into the gallery space a reflection that, with great emotional intensity and deep involvement, traces a personal path shaped by the great desires of childhood and, at the same time, by the darkest and most destabilizing fears tied to a world that doesn’t always live up to the depth of every human soul.
In the large exhibition space, Thix, now an adult, stages the dream of a dress as pink and pristine as the inclinations and desires of a young life that too soon felt trapped in a body perceived as foreign. Within a space that surprises and captivates, in its constant echo of the dreamlike and the mysterious, the recognizable trait of her palette maps out a path that breaks the mold and speaks with force. The wooden furniture, austere and sober in its presence, engages in dialogue with poetic touches of pink, which turn the space into a possible site for a bodily transformation, understood as a return to the most authentic version of oneself.
Critique, reflection and denunciation intertwine to guide the viewer through the impossible rooms of a mental closure that turns a natural rite of passage into something painful. In the absence of a mattress and of the cabinet doors, stripped even of glass and mirrors, Thix speaks to the force of a change that can’t truly be shared without an authentic and conscious understanding of other people’s life paths.
Within these environments devoted to a ritual of transformation, a selection of pictorial fragments gathers emotions, memories and traces of an existence rendered through art, listening to a space that is finally new, welcoming and livable.
Between poetry, experimentation and an evocation of Artemisia Gentileschi’s hand, the Brazilian artist pays homage to a kind of painting that inevitably springs from personal experience and its complexities. In cutting ties with what has been, Thix entrusts her own pictorial imagery and her own figure to iconographic models that made the dramatic chiaroscuro of the Baroque unmistakable throughout the world.
Envisioning a space suspended between the ghostly and the fairy-tale, the imagination runs beyond a (non-)bed in dialogue with a nightstand shaped like a pony, while the gaze drifts from the more conventional exhibition path to linger on a set of fake nails that dreams of transforming into DNA and, with it, into the entire whirlwind of one’s own identity.
Article by Floriana Savino
