Starting on May 24, 2025, Martins&Montero gallery presents Entrevero, a solo exhibition by artist Michel Zózimo that brings together a new set of works developed over the last two years. This is the first time the artist exhibits a large-format painting, continuing the persistent rigor that permeates his research and production — a work porous to time, texture and nature.

Zózimo presents works in multiple media — collages, drawings, paintings, ceramics, embroidery, bronze and wood —, all marked by the same formal and rhythmic logic. The diversity of media does not compromise the unity of the whole, on the contrary: it reinforces it. The embroidery, made in partnership with the artist Fernanda Gassen, resembles a needle painting, in which the technique is reinvented according to the demands of the image. The ceramics, initiated over a decade ago, carry the weight of time matured through modeling, pattern and material.

The title Entrevero operates as a conceptual core and an expanded semantic field. It gives name to what is mixed, what is jumbled, what is seen without distinctness. It also carries the regionalist resonance of southern Brazil: confusion as confrontation, as an indistinct tension between forces in motion. And, finally, it echoes the verb “entrever” [to glimpse], this liminal gesture between the visible and what escapes perception. The exhibition, as its titles suggests, is a territory of entanglements: between technique and intuition, nature and artifact, figure and background, human and non-human.

Zózimo expands on his ongoing research on old encyclopedic images, which are marked by their own temporality — printing noises, involuntary textures, flaws that become material. He responds to these images with a patient and continuous gesture, reminiscent of tebori tattooing: on paper, the India ink constructs light and shadow through dotted grids, as if drawing from a tactile memory of time. It is a kind of graphic trance, which artist Cristiano Lenhardt, author of the exhibition text, describes as “psychoengraving” — a practice that is close to meditation, where the author dissolves into his own repetition.

The exhibition reveals an entrevero of flowers, fruits and animals, where the viewer’s gaze is called upon to recognize shapes, patterns and eyes — in a subtle evocation of pareidolia, that ancestral instinct to identify faces as means of survival. There is, however, no linear narrative. What guides the experience is a sensory unfolding, a sequential organic impetus that connects the works as if they were derivatives of the same body.

In Entrevero there is a subtle — yet firm — affirmation of a politics of the indistinct. In the works, as in life, there are no rigid separations: human and non-human animals share the same plane, just as figure and background dissolve into one another. It is in this ambiguous terrain that the exhibition is established: the immersion in a universe where time, matter and gesture intertwine.