MÁRCIA FALCÃO Flesh Monuments
Night Gallery is pleased to announce Flesh Monuments, an exhibition of new paintings by Márcia Falcão. This is the artist’s debut solo presentation in the United States and follows her participation in the 2023 group exhibition The Big Picture.
Urgency defines Márcia Falcão’s life and work. Falcão brings to her studio an intense desire, an eagerness to witness the materialization of painting and explore this field of knowledge. Her urgency extends beyond artistic expression to the artist’s need to provide for her family and guarantee her autonomy: Living in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, Falcão is also the mother of two children.
Biography permeated Falcão’s early works. Recurring motifs included the landscapes of Rio de Janeiro and everyday scenes of people living in the city's suburbs. The landscape was always the backdrop for the human figures, particularly women, whom Falcão represented in palettes of browns and reds. With vigorous gestures and generous, layered applications of paint, Falcão continues to establish an intricate relationship between the body and pictorial matter: She explores flesh in a penetrating way, at times re-enacting the systematic violence that threatens bodies—especially women’s bodies. Other works feature equally intense scenes of ecstasy, suggesting a dramatic duality between pleasure and pain.
In her most recent series, and the works on view in Flesh Monuments, the exterior landscape is inscribed or marked on the body. The body, at once violated and resilient, becomes the landscape as well as a metaphor for oil painting: There is a procedural nakedness in the very act of painting, which is revealed on the finished canvases. Falcão experiments with the pictorial field, variously erasing and highlighting. She lures the viewer into a visual game of interchange between veiled elements, gestural memories, and chromatic sensations. Her paintings challenge the linearity of time and the viewer's visual experience.
In her Yoga series, for example, Falcão explores the relationship between bodies and space, seeking a dialogue between the desire for freedom and the feeling of imprisonment. Each work portrays a palpable conflict: The bodies seem to struggle against the limitations of the painting or an interior frame, almost surpassing them. The color palette is subtle, marked by earthen tones that capture the nuances of skin and highlight the tension in each scene. The series is marked by introspection and a desire to balance interior and external representations.
In Capoeiras, Falcão introduces a more dynamic, perhaps playful, energy. Capoeira is an art form unto itself, and the artist’s research into its emblematic movements and blows inspire her representations of the body. Falcão paints with a palette of vibrant, acidic colors that suggest pulsating energy and movement. Here, bodies contort and intertwine in frenetic dance, evoking freedom and vitality.
The Monumentais series expands on the previous works, challenging traditional notions of space and form. Falcão aims for the sublime, making paintings that transcend mere visual representation. The figures, mostly larger-than-life, seem to unfold before our eyes as they gradually reveal their contours and shapes. The color palette becomes more complex, with carefully balanced saturations and shades of gray. Time and space appear to merge between various bodies. Once again, landscape engulfs the figure. But here, the landscape is interior.
Throughout Flesh Monuments, urgency is not simply about denouncing violence. The artist challenges the viewer’s expectations, at times exploring the grotesque or provoking a visceral reaction as she disrupts the constant seduction of images.
–Ana Roman