One of the rising names of the new wave of Brazilian visual artists, about to turn 44, Maranhão Thiago Martins de Melo inaugurated this week, in São Luís, his first solo exhibition.
The collection – baptized from Cosmogony -, brings together 21 works produced between 2013 and 2025. It occupies rooms of the Mercês Convent and the Chão Slz Cultural Space, which are in the historic center of São Luís.
Curated by Germano Dushá – one of the curators of the last panorama of Brazilian art of the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo – the exhibition houses a multiplicity of languages, including large paintings, sculptures, engravings, experimental videos and facilities by Thiago, moving between expressionist and realistic techniques.
Germano points out some aspects considered in the process of choosing the pieces of the show that materialize the identity of the artist. He says that “the idea was not exactly to create a chronological exhibition, but that it could take a nerve, could synthesize the main spiritual, political and aesthetic axes of Thiago’s trajectory. I think the core of the work is exactly this profusion of languages, shapes and themes. Cosmogony – Talks a lot about creations, world creation and genesis, but always with a lot of strength, a lot of energy and cargo, he argues.
The works bring history, politics, mysticism and spirituality. Title Cosmogony It points to this conjugation between creation and fury, between genesis and confrontation materializing battles, syncretic rites and epiphanies.
Vocabulary
“People who may have never heard of Thiago and may not be so close to the field of contemporary art. I think it offers a wealth of thematic, conceptual, visual, formal, but it can have a very open, very popular dimension. I think it is a strong, very strong, very strong work. [Algo que] It can go through figurative and abstract issues, more conceptual and more direct, clearer, literal issues even, very sensitively, very unique. In a very own way. And he is an artist of a vocabulary, of a repertoire, of such a rich universe, and is always talking about human issues, ”he emphasizes.
Woman watches work on drywall and four TV monitors at the Mercês Convent – Photo – Tomaz Silva/Agência Brasil
Thiago says that the choices of the topics covered in his work transmute his identity, experiences and his visual references, as well as literary research on subjects that he wants to materialize in his works.
The artist says that “I see my work from where I was born, my identity is set in Latin America, the light, the colors, the struggles and the respect for ancestry. We are a mestizo people, so many spiritual, mythical and legendary narratives are mergers of European, indigenous and African narratives with the same stories told in many regions. Hermetic and alchemy, as well as the tarot. ”
Artistic baggage
Born in 1981, in São Luís, Maranhão, the artist lives and works among the Ludovicense lands, São Paulo and Guadalajara, in Mexico. He opened individual exhibitions in several cities in Brazil as at the Iberê Camargo Foundation in Porto Alegre; at the National Museum of the Republic, in Brasilia; at the São Paulo Cultural Center, in the state capital; and at the Joaquim Nabuco Foundation, in Recife.
It also participated in dozens of collective exhibitions inside and outside the country, especially the Mercosur Biennial in Porto Alegre, 31st São Paulo Biennial, the first Amazon Biennial, the Lyon Biennial, France and the 12th Dakar Biennial in Senegal, among others.
His works are part of permanent collections in museums focused on contemporary art in cities such as Miami, in Oslo (Fearnley Museum of Modern Art), Masp and Pinacoteca in São Paulo; and the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro.
