RIO DE JANEIRO.- Noite Quente, Tatiana Chalhoub’s exhibition at Carpintaria, marks the artist’s first solo presentation in her native Rio de Janeiro in a decade. The new body of work brings together ceramic collages, bronze reliefs, and, for the first time, a group of large-scale oil paintings that occupy a central place within the exhibition. Grounded in the technical and formal language of painting, Chalhoub here turns to oil on canvas, expanding her practice while foregrounding the medium’s capacity for depth, saturation, and transformation. These paintings extend concerns present in her more sculptural works—warped reliefs, tactile surfaces, and the fusion of image and matter—while allowing pigment to flow more freely, assuming the contours of landscapes or still lifes through layered, aqueous compositions. Across the exhibition, loose pieces, fragments, and residue are reworked into reinterpretations of nature, art history, or mental notes, converging in a world of liquid hues and shifting atmospheres. Suspended between icon and intimacy, the works embrace chance and unpredictability, with pictorial solutions emerging from ruptures, noise, and deviations in process.

The atmosphere of the show evokes nightfall in the urban forests of Rio de Janeiro, as shadows deepen and animal life shifts in the fading light. Burning Night (Homem Doiguiano) (2026) presents a hunched human figure, a distant glimpse of a mysterious jungle dweller at dusk, framed between tree trunks rendered in richly textured layers of paint. Asa de Inseto (2026), Casulo (2026), and Pássaro (2026) depict an insect wing, a cocoon, and a bird at an ambiguous scale, somewhere between the minute and the gigantic, echoing the processes of growth, metamorphosis, and expansion embodied by these forms. Recorte de Papelão (2026) is Chalhoub’s first large-scale bronze relief, composed of cut-out shapes whose negative spaces suggest a repertoire of floral contours that recur throughout the exhibition. As curator and researcher Fernanda Lopes writes in the essay accompanying the exhibition, “Noite Quente is not a show to be taken in from a fixed position. It unfolds as you move through it, with perception constantly shifting. The works hover between proximity and distance, never settling into a single scale. This oscillation between micro and macro is not just formal but structural: the work only fully emerges through the movement of the body in space.”

Chalhoub was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1987, where she holds a degree in Graphic Design from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), completed in 2012. Between 2012 and 2014, she worked in the studio of artist Lúcia Laguna, an experience that proved decisive in the consolidation of her visual vocabulary. From 2015 onward, her practice underwent a shift as she began to incorporate ceramics as a central field of her investigations in painting, a development that took place within a shared studio with Arthur Chaves, where she worked until 2018. Between August 2018 and January 2021, she lived in Europe, moving across different contexts of production. In Budapest, she undertook a six-month residency that culminated in the exhibition On the grass, presented at Project Space 1111. She then relocated to Brussels, where she shared a studio with artists from the local scene. She returned to Brazil in 2021 and settled in São Paulo, where she currently lives and works.