From August 20 to September 19, Martins&Montero presents loopinpindorama in São Paulo, a group exhibition that articulates works from the gallery’s collection alongside those of guest artists, bringing together different generations and visual languages based on recurrences, continuities, deviations, and interruptions in Brazilian artistic production. The show is curated by Felipe Molitor.
The portmanteau word that titles the exhibition stems from an imperfect overlap: looping—a term associated, in the audiovisual field, with the continuous repetition of a sequence—fuses with Pindorama, a toponym of Tupi origin related to the territory today called Brazil. This invented word condenses, through its sonic loops, a familiar yet unsettling feeling: that of something that returns, feeds on itself, and insists on continuing. In a year once again marked by general elections, loopinpindorama takes this movement less as a theme than as a condition: rather than proposing a portrait of the country, the exhibition dwells on images, forms, and impasses that reappear over time.
The show also stems from a reading of Martins&Montero’s own trajectory: a significant core of the works belongs to its collection or relates to the experimental essence and intergenerational articulations that mark its history. To this core are added guest artists whose research expands, displaces, or generates friction within these relationships, making the exhibition an encounter between already established histories and still possible affinities.
Organized in two moments, loopinpindorama first presents itself as an anthology of video art in Brazil. In a single projection, works made at different historical moments appear in a variable sequence. This anthology, however, operates as a device with its own kinematics: authorship and martinsemontero.comsequence are not immediately revealed, and the public interferes with what is being shown, being able to linger in front of an artwork or hasten the arrival of the next. The device thus incorporates a contemporary regime of attention—in which skipping, interrupting, and searching for the next image have become ordinary gestures—without framing them merely as a deficit or loss. At the same time, it shifts a portion of the decision-making power normally concentrated in curatorial programming to the spectator: an individual choice begins to affect the collective experience.
In a second moment, paintings, photographs, sculptures, objects, and installations replace the temporal succession of the video with relationships of proximity, contiguity, or disparity. Works by Lydia Okumura, Rafael França, Ava Rocha, Lia D Castro, Pontogor, among others, are brought together by formal, material, or conceptual resonances and frictions, without these relationships stabilizing into a linear narrative.
As a highlight, TV (2018), by Luiz Roque, articulates video and sculpture within a large white L-shaped structure, upon which rests a circular wooden volume. At one end, a monitor displays colored geometric figures that slide continuously, in the manner of an old screensaver. Somewhere between electronic device, sculpture, architecture, and moving image, the work gathers some of the ambiguities of the exhibition: what seems to advance remains in a circuit; what belongs to a technological past returns as an image; what should function merely as a support acquires a body and takes up space.
More than organizing a narrative about the Brazil that was and the Brazil that is, loopinpindorama settles in the interval between both. The past returns and is reactualized in the present; the future sometimes appears as mere continuity. Between staying and passing, recognizing and interrupting, the exhibition asks itself what to do in the face of that which insists on repeating itself.
Artists – paintings, sculptures, photographs, objects, and installations: 3NÓS3; Ava Rocha; Frederico Ravioli; Helena Ramos; João Livra; Lia D Castro; Luiz Roque; Lydia Okumura; Manoela Cezar; Pontogor; Rafael França; Renato Pera; Thomaz Rosa.
Artists – video room: Aline Motta; Anna Bella Geiger; Cinthia Marcelle; Dias & Riedweg; Felipe Barsuglia; Guerreiro do Divino Amor; Jota Mombaça; Juraci Dórea; Nicolas Thomé Zetune; Regina Silveira; Sonia Andrade; Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino.
