Estudo para Visto, 2025-2026
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- It is true that vision depends on movement. One sees only what one looks at. What would vision be without any eye movements—and how would such movement not confuse things if it were merely reflexive or blind, if it lacked its antennae, its clairvoyance, if vision did not anticipate it?1
The drawings in the Study for Visto series produced in 2026 continued to be executed using water-soluble colored pencils on Japanese grid paper; however, both their palette and the images created opened up to other hues and contours.
While the drawings in this series—created between 2024 and 2025—were previously limited to an earthy palette, the works produced now incorporate oranges, carmine reds, pinks, and purples.
The slender silhouettes also proved to be more floral in nature, drawing upon the observation of scrolls, cornices, rosettes, angels, and ornaments from 18th-century Baroque and Rococo art in Minas Gerais, yet also subjected to techniques of image distortion and transformation, while simultaneously flirting with Art Nouveau decorative elements.
Once these images adorning an eye—or a sort of amulet, mask, talisman, or piece of Baroque jewelry featuring an inlaid eye (the eye that “sees the world and what the world lacks...”)2—had been created, and favoring an earthy, reddish palette, it was decided to mount the designs onto scraps of natural leather dyed in shades of red that I kept in my studio, having previously used them to restore the armchairs and chairs there. In this mounting design, leather would be used both for a radial area surrounding the vertical and horizontal rectangular drawings—as well as the ovals, arranged in various orientations—acting much like a mat, and for covering the frame profiles themselves. I had envisioned a shoemaker carrying out this work, given the precision and meticulousness required to construct this “body"; however, the person who ultimately took charge of the project—and who delivered the best results—was a restorer of antique bookbindings. This mounting style further emphasized the concepts of “body" and “skin" inherent in the Study for Visto series of drawings.
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Visible and mobile, my body counts itself among things—it is one of them, caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. Yet, given that it sees and moves, it holds things in a circle around itself; they are an appendage or an extension of itself, embedded in its flesh, part of its full definition, and the world is made of the very stuff of the body.3
In a way, a certain fetishistic quality has emerged in the bodies depicted in the recent drawings from the Study for Visto series.
Thiago Honório, July 2026.
1. MERLEAU-PONTY, Maurice. O olho e o espírito. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2004, p. 16 (our translation).
2. ___________ . O olho e o espírito. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2004, p. 19 (our translation).
3. ___________ . O olho e o espírito. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2004, p. 17 (our translation).
Work Details
Study for Visto, 2025-2026
Watercolor pencils on squared paper; leather
22 x 26 cm
26 x 36 cm
36 x 26 cm
photo: Edouard Fraipont
Exhibitions
Inverno dentro do bosque, Luciana Brito, SP, 2026