"The body is the center of the dialogue that Karin Cagy and Paula Boechat present to the public of the Getúlio Vargas Municipal Memorial. The artists, whose research focuses on painting as an expressive medium for their poetics, come together in this exhibition to present their most recent works. Both share an idea about the body and time, which imprint their marks, limitations and finitude on everything. However, contrary to what one might imagine, all the values that could be negatively approached here assume a positive character in relation to existence itself. Time, body and life operate in this exhibition as a tool for sublimating pain and fertile ground for desires.

In Carne Viva, the artists exhibit works created in the post-pandemic context, in which the perception of time and its value have been redefined. If before the passage of time was merely a succession of hours, now it is the indelible mark of experience, sagacity and consciousness. Or rather, it is a pulse of life, an expansion of the capacity to dream. The condition of being a woman in a world marked by the pressure of patriarchy, misogyny and the market for ideal beauty certainly sets the tone for both discourses. Being a woman, with ambitions and hopes in Carne Viva, is the motto of what is presented.

Karin Cagy, who spent many years working in the fashion industry as a professional, currently focuses her artistic interest on creating a liberating narrative for women's bodies. Skin, wrinkles, and lace are visual attributes that, sewn into fabrics or symbolically into paintings and drawings, narrate the condition of being a woman with its pains and delights. The bodies, usually altered to fit aesthetic standards, appear fragmented, bringing together the marks of life itself with a peculiar seduction. Beauty here is not affiliated with the classical standard, but rather a plea for the liberation of desire in Flesh and Blood.

Paula Boechat, whose poetics have always been centered on the body, notably with an interest in the visceral matter that composes it, presents a recent repositioning of her work. After contracting bacterial meningitis in 2023, the artist was struck down by profound deafness. This condition caused the constant presence of a “hum,” a noise similar to the “hum of the sea,” as the artist herself describes it. The intensity of the noise and its constancy are understood by Paula as the sounds of a deserted beach. All these sensations and perceptions resurface in the paintings, in which the body – still undergoing motor rehabilitation – is the protagonist. The active body, like Living Flesh, pulsates with color and energy the pictorial gestures that consolidate her abstraction.

Finally, it is interesting to consider that the exhibition is presented in a space dedicated to a man, during whose government women won the right to vote and maternity leave. These achievements were certainly not obtained by the free will of the hegemonically male leadership of Brazil at the time, but by the struggle of women who fought for these legal guarantees. Karin Cagy and Paula Boechat offer the public an opportunity to rethink behaviors, to redefine the relationship with the female world, and, above all, to deconstruct prejudices and stereotypes that interrupt the flow of life and castrate dreams. The desire of both is that life pulses in each visitor like an unrelenting sensation in Flesh Alive."

Shannon Botelho

Curator