The colors reflected in the rock hold within them the energy of the Earth’s core. Their stories are told in layers and textures that permeate the pores of every corner. Grains and stones reveal their journeys, their frictions, their slides and erosions, between the sky and the ground, under suns and rains, in the countless cycles of an infinite journey.

Marlene Almeida began her work over fifty years ago, inspired by the chromatic vibration of the coastal barriers of Paraíba. For the artist, it is in field research that the artwork first happens: in the encounter of colors, textures, and smells of each soil. Her practice involves meticulous and interdisciplinary work through artistic-scientific expeditions around Brazil and the world. During her travels, she absorbs knowledge and collects samples of the Earth, which she then catalogs, processes, and transforms into the foundation for her works. In her studio-laboratory, fragments of rocks and clays carefully separated into jars form an immense archive that holds the molecular memory of the ground from which they came. Between science, alchemy, and poetry, it is there that the artist transmutes residues of cliffs, valleys, plains, hills, roads, and caves into raw material and metaphor. By using procedures common to the fields of chemistry, geology, and archaeology, her process articulates investigations into the stability, durability, and other characteristics of each soil with philosophical reflections on the telluric ancestry and polychromatic sedimentation of its entrails. Through experiments with the spectra and nuances of natural pigments from each location, the artist reworks the essences of the Earth’s crust. Between solid and liquid states, her paintings, sculptures, and installations synthesize and reimagine the experience of the planet, proposing immersions among earthy tones that both affirm memory and conjure new meanings for the places where the artist has been.

For the 38th Panorama, Marlene Almeida presents two works with distinct dynamics. Derrame [Spill] (2024) is a new installation made with raw cotton cutouts dyed with pigments derived from basalt, a volcanic rock that, when decomposed, produces clays from which dyes are extracted. Impregnated with shades of terracotta, ochre, brown, and gray, the fabrics carry a high energetic density, embodying the temperature of the earth and the history of the various locations from which they were collected1. The artist links the pieces together to form a mountain that winds through the space, evoking the animism of rocks in continuous transformation. In the other work, Tempo voraz II [Voracious Time II] (2012), Marlene Almeida reflects on existential issues in the face of the fleeting nature of life. The artist reinterprets the millennia-old use of hourglasses as human devices for measuring time and giving it materiality through the sand that flows inside glass capsules. The work, which is part of a series initiated between 1999 and 2000, consists of five raw cotton sacks filled with soil from different places in northeastern Brazil and dyed, in the lower half, with pigments from dark earth. The resulting image presents a contrast between light and dark, positive and negative, heat and cold, emptiness and fullness. In these hourglasses where both sides are sealed, the immobilized sand manifests the desire to stop time. However, the contrast we perceive seems inevitably alive, much like the voracity of time, which allows and consumes everything, which creates and destroys everything.