drawingdesire [desenhodesejo]
The unconscious conspires incessantly. When we sleep, it reveals itself in dreams; when we're awake, it catches us unaware with words and symbols that overflow into the architecture of our gestures. Scribbles from pencils that repeat themselves, fusing colors and edging around the outline of what seems not to fit, like a thirsty person, drinking from the intensity without ever being sated. Metal molded onto the body itself, lending its flesh, framing desires.
desenhodesejo ["drawingdesire"], from the tip of the pencil, weaving, at the tight threshold, on delicate graph paper, risks asymmetric precision, like a touch that adorns and caresses the perimeter of the skin, allowing it to get lost in the body's unusual curves. Made of broken charcoal, desenhodesejo traces vigorous bodies that swell into metal once they no longer fit on the paper. So naked and at the same time protected by the material that shapes them.
Thiago Honório e Julia Gallo fuse their stories, permeated by reverence for learning and, like the natural emancipation of an apprentice, they stand face to face, in a dance of spied-upon and desired bodies. Emancipation and attraction tauten and provoke the artistic drive, catching off-guard what is hidden in the unconscious; to the naked eye, it spies a body that dances, it spies a pierced body, revealed through an opening in the clothing, it spies pain that doesn't fit.
In both works, the repetition of the movement resembles a sacred gesture, as if in a spiritual fervor, the rosary running between the fingers; gestures that insist on repetition and require full attention to each stroke on the paper and each ding that mars the metal.
Estudo para Visto ["Study for the Seen"], a monocle that is seeing, absorbing; a solitary, meticulous witness. Adorned, it becomes an amulet which converges the sacred and the profane in that which it spies on and desires, making space for things that didn't fit. The mantric dance of the pencil's strokes ventures into another layer of the desire that disrobes.
The ability to shape anatomy, chewed by the exhaustive trance, erects Armadura de São Sebastião [“Armor of St. Sebastian”], giving birth to pieces of a dream, pieces of fantasy pieces, pieces of memory; provoking textures and internal images in the eye that sees it. Built and twisted with hands and fingers, the standing saint dons his armor and is wounded in the battle between the ambiguity of desire and the sacred.
desenhodesejo introduces tensions between the peeping eye, sanctified in wood, and the bodies torn by arrows, that which spills over with desire. Sublimation and flesh, the drive for life and death. Martyr. Thiago and Julia generously provide us this delight through the joint exhibition of the works Estudo para Visto and Armadura de São Sebastião.
— Gil Kehl, May 12, 2025. Wesak Full Moon
Gil Kehl is an Ayureveda therapist whose emphasis is on investigating the archaeological layers of the emotional body and the study of vital architecture