NIURA BELLAVINHA

TORÓ

Curated by Viviane Matesco, Rafael Peixoto and Marcus Lontra

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Water, mud, blood, sap, and sky. Niura Bellavinha moves among the essential elements. In this exhibition, presenting her recent body of work, the artist shares her investigations into painting as an expanded field of gestures, materials, memories, and cosmic connections.

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Toró means a heavy rainstorm—a mass of water descending from the sky with the violent force of nature. Derived from the Old Tupi term ytororoma (“water gushing forth”), the word carries the wisdom of ancestral languages that used sound to describe aspects of life. Toró is not only water; it is also the noise that alerts and awakens the senses. Borrowed from the title of one of the works on view, it becomes here a synthesis of operations that are central to Niura’s creative universe and a symbol of an artistic practice that, over decades, has opened veins, followed traces, and continually reaffirmed itself as an existential outpouring.

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Form, so often constrained by lines and contours, expands into a kind of liquefied concretism. Through contrasts, white reveals the negative imprint of the gesture, an existential void. Flows and condensations are sustained by the vitality of matter: mining residues, meteorite dust, vegetal pigments, and canga stone. The connection between the organic and the mineral, flesh and stone, evokes a sacrificial act that reaches back to ancient cosmogonies—the opening of the earth and the extraction of its blood, coagulated into metal.

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Occupying these exhibition spaces, the works seem to echo the torrent of time itself. Official histories and silenced memories collide among veils and shrouds. Everything is fragment, from the visceral gesture to the cosmic dust blown across the canvas. From Minas Gerais to the unfathomable universe, the creative force of Niura Bellavinha is a downpour that cannot be contained. It is a vital, visceral, and spiritual eruption. It is Toró.

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Viviane Matesco, Rafael Peixoto and Marcus Lontra