Between Us and Things

Casa de Cultura do Parque presents the exhibition “Entre nós e as coisas” (Between Us and Things) from November 14, 2026, to March 7, 2027, as part of its III Exhibition Cycle of the year. Curated by Claudio Cretti, the institution’s artistic director, the group exhibition brings together works by Cassio Michalany, Célia Euvaldo, Elizabeth Jobim, João Trevisan, Matheus Machado, and Renata Tassinari. The accompanying critical text is written by curator Fernanda Albuquerque.
Featuring artists from different generations, each with their own distinct working processes, the exhibition does not propose a homogeneous understanding of abstraction. Instead, it brings the artists together through their ability to transform painting into a space for investigation. Taking as its starting point the work of Cassio Michalany (São Paulo, 1949–2024), which focuses on questioning painting as a means of representing the world, “Entre nós e as coisas” approaches abstraction not as a withdrawal from the world, but as a way of engaging with it through other means.
In Michalany’s work, color is material in its own right. His works, similar yet never identical, establish delicate and precise relationships between colors, in which the simplicity of the structure contains a perceptual complexity. The selection includes works from different periods of his career, ranging from oil on canvas to enamel on wood, as well as colored-pencil drawings.
The paintings of Célia Euvaldo (São Paulo, 1955), meanwhile, emerge from the interplay between the movement of the brush, the thickness or dilution of the paint, and the surface that remains blank. In her more recent works, the presence of vivid, vibrant colors shifts the familiar field of black and white, allowing color to imbue the canvases with their own character and energy, ultimately becoming a body in itself.
The relationship between painting and the body becomes even more evident in the work of Elizabeth Jobim (Rio de Janeiro, 1957), in which stitching transforms the surface into a space of encounters. Fabric planes are painted and then joined, interrupted, and folded, giving painting a tactile, bodily dimension and bringing her practice closer to a sculptural experience.
In the work of João Trevisan (Brasília, 1986), the dialogue between plane and space also takes on a decisive role. In his so-called Maquetinhas, Afetinhos, and Canaletinhas duplas, wooden cuts give physical form to the paintings, opening them up to a three-dimensional dimension. This process creates a kind of pictorial object, whose geometric designs contrast with the handcrafted quality and gestural expression visible both in the cuts and in the paintings themselves.
Matheus Machado (Jacareí, São Paulo, 1987), in turn, brings abstract geometry into dialogue with the visual memory of popular culture. His compositions accumulate layers of paint and color fields separated by lines marked by both a certain rigor and an imprecision that invites viewers to linger. Renata Tassinari (São Paulo, 1958), meanwhile, presents a diverse selection of works. From paintings that become objects to those that flirt with the idea of “being a thing,” as in Untitled (1989), as well as works combining drawing and collage, acrylic, wood, paper, and framing cease to occupy fixed positions and instead become active elements in the construction of the artwork.