SAO PAULO.- Valeska Soares’ exhibition Tableau, opening August 30th at Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, in São Paulo, presents new and recent works that delve into themes of absence, ghostly presences, impermanence and eroticism. The title alludes to the narrative dimension of Soares’ work, in which each piece functions as a fragment in a larger plot. Meaning remains open to interpretation, but the enigmas and ambiguities weave a network of allusions that connect and enhance many of her longstanding conceptual concerns: the tensions between sight and sound, memory and erasure, objects and desire.
The show is composed of three distinct bodies of work. In the Blindface (2025) series, a development of her previous Doublefaces, Soares employs discarded images of female nudes, mounting them backward on frames and cutting the canvas to reveal glimpses of landscape and body fragments. The work tampers with visibility and concealment: what is shown always relates to what is hidden or erased. In the installation calling (2025), a bronze bell cast in the shape of an apple is suspended above a large wooden table. A hidden mechanism sets the bell in motion at irregular intervals, producing a soft chime that momentarily breaks the silence. The piece unfolds over time, suggesting a call or signal that remains unanswered. The transformation of the apple into a bell combines ideas of attraction and interruption, and marks time through sound rather than movement.
Elsewhere, bronze sculptures of domestic tools—like a broom, a brush, and a floor squeegee—are displayed in static, unlikely positions. These objects appear animated yet untouched, suggesting a break from their original function. In Upside-down (2024), a bronze vase is inverted, balanced on its flowers and leaves, subverting a familiar decorative object into a structure that resists its intended use. Together, the works in the exhibition point to subtle shifts in how we perceive labor, memory, and presence in a domestic realm.
The work of Valeska Soares mobilizes time, memory, and fiction to reveal the imaginative potential of absence and the construction of meaning from partial images. Emptiness, transience, and impermanence form a field of tensions materialized in her installations, films, paintings, sculptures, and assemblages. These conceptual articulations are evident both in her choice of materials and in the spatial combinations they allow. Mirrors, book covers, found canvases, and packaging are manipulated, shuffled, cut out, and rearranged, creating relationships between intimacy and estrangement, architecture and the body, matter and thought.
