Dark Matter brings together works by Erika Malzoni, Jacque Faus, and Manuella Silveira, curated by Ana Roman at Almeida & Dale’s space at 1430 Fradique Coutinho Street.

Through the works of the three artists, the curatorial proposal reflects on the instability and constant mutation of matter and images, offering a counterpoint to the hypervisibility of our time.

Inspired by the studies of United States astronomer Vera Rubin, who discovered dark matter — an invisible form of matter that neither emits nor reflects light, but whose existence is perceived through the gravitational effects it exerts on galaxies and structures of the universe — curator Ana Roman investigates in this exhibition how materiality reveals or conceals itself, and what still escapes classification and interpretation. In opposition to the modern tradition initiated with the Enlightenment, which leans on scientific objectivity to dominate and clarify the world, the curatorial approach seeks the limits of this understanding through the unknown and the inexact exposed in Rubin’s research.

“The starting point for this exhibition is this place of uncertainty. Erika Malzoni, Jacque Faus, and Manuella Silveira reach it through distinct paths, but they all, in their own way, push the boundary between what appears and what supports appearance, between the inside and outside of things, between what matter shows of itself and what it withholds,” describes the curator.

Considering that contemporary times are governed by what Roman describes as a regime of hypervisibility, the exhibition proposes a journey through Malzoni’s works, whose body of work, formed through the approximation and tension of precarious objects, is “marked by the human desire to structure the world and by what continually eludes forms of classification”; through Faus’s ceramic sculptures, “structures that seem to elude any defined temporality” and evoke rock formations, living organisms, or fossils; and through Silveira’s dense paintings, constituted equally through the process of depositing paint and scraping their surfaces, which establish themselves “as a field of continuous action” traversed by “forces of pressure, wear, and accumulation, where the image seems constantly on the verge of coming together or falling apart.”

In Dark Matter, the works converge not through formal or linguistic similarity, but because they reverberate, in different ways, the impossibility of fully mastering and interpreting matter.