Marlene Almeida is one of the artists featured in Energia: artisticpresence in the Belgian – Brazilian landscape, opening onSeptember 3 at TheMerode in Brussels, Belgium.

The exhibition aims to establish an artistic dialogue betweenBelgium and Brazil through the interplay of the landscapes ofboth countries. Almeida presents a set of new paintings createdwith pigments extracted from different soils across Brazilianterritory — the result of a research she has been developing sincethe 1970s. In this body of work, the artist turns to images oftopography and earthly forms, composing mountains and cliffsunder stains of color that lend texture to the surface of the works.

The paintings also carry a formal quality resolved in the contrastbetween earthy shadow and intense light, as in Pão de Açúcar I and II, where the artist depicts the emblematic pair of hills in Rio de Janeiro. She does so through a vertical elevation that subvertsthe geographic notion of the tourist landmark while, at the sametime, imparting balance to the composition.

Curated by Benedicte Goesaert and Kathleen Weyts, theexhibition runs until March 31, 2026.