On Saturday, August 3rd, Millan will open the group show Seis propostas de Calvino [Calvino’s Six Memos], curated by Antonio Gonçalves Filho. The exhibition invites contemporary artists from different generations to discuss the Six Memos for the Next Millennium by Italian author Italo Calvino (1923-1985): lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, and consistency.

The idea is to align the works of six artists with each of the lectures that Italo Calvino was to give at Harvard University in 1985, discussing the qualities of artistic creation to be preserved into the new millennium. “Calvino, alongside the German writer W. G. Sebald (1944-2001), was the contemporary author who was most concerned with the relation between writing and image,” says the curator. “His six memos for the third millennium are therefore relevant to the literary and visual arts worlds, which justifies revisiting the content of his lectures in the current context.”

The curator has suggested correspondences between the works of Ana Amorim (b. 1956, São Paulo, Brazil) to quickness; those of Cassio Michalany (1949-2024, São Paulo, Brazil) with exactitude; those of Emmanuel Nassar (b. 1949, Capanema, Brazil) with consistency; those of Miguel Rio Branco (b. 1946, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain) with visibility; those of Tatiana Blass (b. 1979, São Paulo, Brazil) with multiplicity; and those of Thiago Hattnher (b. 1990, São Paulo, Brazil) with lightness.

Over twenty works were selected from these artists, including historical and recent pieces, as well as those created specifically for the exhibition. This is the case with Tatiana Blass’s Multiplicidade series, which dialogues directly with selected passages from Calvino’s book. These paintings, created with oil and wax on bronze, ceramic, or metal, are coupled with an electric resistor that transforms their surface. As the first layer of wax melts, a new image is revealed. The process is shown on video alongside the paintings, except in Multiplicity #4: The Observer Intervenes to Modify the Observed Phenomena. This piece will melt throughout the exhibition, triggered by a proximity sensor.

Responding to lightness, painter Thiago Hattnher also presents pieces created especially for the show. Ana Amorim presents a drawing and an embroidered work, from 2019 and 2020, respectively. These works relate to the idea of quickness which, for Calvino, is subordinate to attentive observation of the world.

Emmanuel Nassar, for his part, took on the challenge of interpreting the sixth proposal, consistency, which, however, had never been written due to the sudden death of Calvino. The artist thus amalgamated all the proposals into a “bookcase” in which the books are series of paintings positioned one on another, constituting a new painting-object.

The concept of visibility is represented by Miguel Rio Branco’s photographs. The renowned artist’s works are metaphors for the visible and the invisible, presenting a façade that resembles a face or a self-portrait where only his shadow can be seen.

Calvino’s Six Memos kicks off the second semester program at Millan and pays tribute to the artist Cassio Michalany, who passed away during the preparation of the exhibition. The show features three of his polyptychs created between 2023 and 2024 in which precise compositions deal with the permutation of colors and shapes on sheets of wood.