Suspended traits: Drawings by Mateus Gandara.

(wall text) 

This exhibition presents an expressive selection of the work of Mateus Gandara, a young artist born  in Goiânia in 1986, who moved to Brasília at the age of 10, where he lived until his passing in  January 2015, at the age of 28. The show seeks to reveal the potential of a body of work that began  to be developed professionally in 2003, when he participated in classes that prepared him for  university, and continued relentlessly until his death. 

His work is typical of a curious individual, open to research that allowed for the exploration of  various materials and themes, and the curatorial selection aimed to highlight this facet. On display  are groups of original drawings that make up sequential works (comics) published in zines and  independent periodicals, including the magazines Samba, Pimba, Mês, and Vudu. 

Also on display are studies for portraits, character designs, scenes, and life models, as well as the  notebooks that were fundamental spaces for his poetic practice. The notebooks were projects that  functioned as diaries, where images and texts coexisted. Even though Gandara left us at such a  young age, he maintained a prolific and diverse body of drawing work, much of which was created  in notebooks, a standard medium for the draftsman. 

His deep interest in the human figure led him to create exercises in which the human being appeared  in the most varied contexts: both as fragments of visual and textual accounts from everyday  situations, and as part of a larger context where the human figure is constantly questioned,  sometimes conditioned, sometimes adrift. The existential condition of humanity is a constant theme,  but it is not fixed in form, as the figure is a body that undergoes various treatments along the way.  Gandara gradually - likely due to his health condition - began to see himself in his work, finding the  figure of Mateus, who becomes a character in his fictions, created and re-created to address a new  way of living, contrary to the supposed natural order of things. And, in one of his notebooks, he  asks: How many years until a trauma is consolidated? A fear? 

The experience of being thrust into a situation of vital instability at such a young age effectively  proves that, in life, we know very little, and this emancipation allowed him to dive into a universe  of stars, galaxies, and unknown planets, much like one of his characters sketched in a notebook,  Dark Matter, a human hybrid. The act of drawing becomes an act of facing monsters, invented  forms in search of new meanings to understand oneself. The paradox is clear: it is in these  moments, when life hangs by a thread, that art seems to find meaning and a place.