MARCIUS GALAN

 Drawings to Organize Pessimism 

In a dark room, we observe two points of light moving through space. The scene resembles the flight of fireflies, the small insects that have practically disappeared from large cities, as their faint and intermittent glow requires deep darkness. To create Cinema (2025), Marcius Galan turned Galeria Luisa Strina into complete darkness. In this work, the minimal unit of drawing—the point—exists as the minimal unit of cinema—light. The wandering flashes, though seemingly random, project a continuous flow while simultaneously providing reference points for the scale and shape of the space. 

The philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman recounts that the glow of five thousand fireflies is equivalent to the amount of light from a single candle.1 Their luminescence is a form of amorous communication, a call for mating. They shine to attract partners. In a way, darkness produces a sense of coziness, welcoming and disarming. Cinema exists as a flight into the void of the gallery. The work is also a tribute to Pier Paolo Pasolini, who created a powerful image of fireflies in 1941, during World War II, when he was studying literature in Bologna. In a letter to a friend, the poet compares the joyful and erratic existence of these insects to art and poetry, seeing them as a vital alternative to the dark times grotesquely illuminated by fascist propaganda. This metaphor is the driving force behind the book Survival of the Fireflies, in which Didi-Huberman discusses the dialectical relationship between historical consciousness and pessimism, ethics and fragility in times of veiled or explicit fascism. In the text, completed in 2008 but strikingly relevant today, the author argues that one must not be content with merely describing barbarism. 

In Mechanics of Continuous Media, Galan draws in space, on nature, and with it. The exhibition title refers to the branch of physics that studies the movement and deformation of bodies—a field of knowledge that deals with time and invisible forces such as magnetism and gravity. Geometry provides the vocabulary of shapes and gestures from which the artist acts upon materials of natural or industrial origin. The works speak of the often faltering way in which the human species inhabits the passage of time. They result from forces of varying rhythm and intensity acting upon bodies that resist according to their own constitution. The idea of resistance is not limited to physical barriers. It refers to resilience, stubbornness, and the drive that propels Galan’s precise and deliberate gestures. 

1 Georges Didi-Huberman. Sobrevivência dos vaga-lumes. Belo Horizonte: Editora da UFMG, 2011, p. 52. 1 

Infinity (1999), a glass tube shaped into a figure-eight, is obstructed by a wax nodule. The inherent optimism of science, test tubes, and clinical analyses is blocked and deformed. The symbol of time’s fluidity is transformed into a clogged vein, suggesting that something is amiss in the course of history. The clot in Infinity contrasts with the unstable persistence portrayed in Counterclockwise (2025). The film depicts a plant filament behaving like a compass, moved by the force of the wind. Despite its fragility, the small twig carves two perfect circles into a rough sandy surface. It resembles the hand of a clock or the needle of a record player, sometimes advancing, sometimes retreating. When the hand moves counterclockwise, we hear a distorted sound. The image of an arc drawn with a compass recurs in the artist’s other works, almost always tied to the idea of violence and transgression—a gesture made with a hard instrument that scratches perfectly polished, artificial surfaces typical of urban contexts. In Counterclockwise, the compass hangs by a thread, its movement trembling and hesitant, discontinuous and noisy. 

In contrast to the absence of light in the first space, the second room of the exhibition presents a series of large-scale works, displayed in full light, made of hard and heavy materials. Two stones, together weighing about a ton, were transported from Bahia and Minas Gerais to form Geological Memory (2025). These fragments of mountains, symbols of permanence, are encircled by two steel lines pointing toward each other in an arrow-like shape, yet never touching. The wires trace a force of attraction that acts slowly and silently, to the point of creating creases in the stones. In the piece Resultant Force (2025), another mark made in space suggests an overwhelming magnetic force defying gravity. A line of iron, drawn toward a nail in the wall, holds a wooden rod in a falling position. The wire and the nail do not touch either. The void between them creates a tense equilibrium. At any moment, there is the possibility that the attraction will fail and everything will collapse. 

In the same brightly lit room, two large-scale panels suggest landscapes that are both cosmic and mundane. Orbital (2025) features four stones—this time, mining discards—arranged on a sleek black surface painted with automotive paint. The work dialogues with Counterclockwise and other pieces by the artist. The stones function as a gravitational force around which sharp objects orbit, aggressively scratching the surface and tracing semicircles with the precision of a compass. 

2 

Low Resolution (2025) is, in a way, both a pleonasm and a paradox. The work alludes to the aerial view of a wildfire, composed of thousands of small cubes of charcoal and wood, while simultaneously evoking pixelated images that spread like fire across the internet. However, the porous materiality of these carbon pixels is the opposite of the minimal unit of light that forms a digital image. The work is an extension of research Galan has been conducting for years, in which he juxtaposes small cubes of charcoal and rubber, creating a tension between the virtual existence of a drawing and its potential erasure. Far from the luminosity of digital technology, the expansion of the black area in Low Resolution is meticulously planned. Only combustion could grant it any shine. 

At a time when new tyrants seek to intimidate any form of dissent at all costs, Marcius Galan presents us with a collection of works that explore different forms of resistance. Oscillating between the acceptance and rejection of the laws of physics, Mechanics of Continuous Media is a solitary protest—a way of organizing pessimism, as Walter Benjamin once advocated2. Imagining supernatural forces driven by the desire to project new configurations of the world is a subtle form of political action and a rejection of barbarism. 

Heloisa Espada 

2 Benjamin quoted by Didi-Huberman, op. cit., p. 118. 3 

Like the yellow bands of his sculptures, the hook in The View from The Widow, the film by Marcius Galan in collaboration with Carlos Issa and Newton Leitão, is one of those architectural elements which, in losing the function it has always been assigned, also loses some of its meanings while reinforcing others. In the film, it is a solitary theatrical character with a low voice who is drawn to conversation by its memories and deliriums. It lies alone, surrounded by a future that has been abandoned. The object of its obsession is a mobile by Alexander Calder, which it sustained for years in a servile and loving way, and is no longer there (will it return?). A mirage remains, perhaps, the work of old age or retirement.

Black Widow, a sculpture by Alexander Calder, was fundamental to abstract art in Brazil. It was one of the works that encouraged Brazilian artists to abandon more anecdotal themes and dive into perceptive studies of geometric abstraction. The combination of Calder’s piece with the pioneering design of the São Paulo offices of the Instituto dos Arquitetos do Brasil [Institute of Architects of Brazil – IAB-SP], coordinated by architects Miguel Forte, Rino Levi, and Abelardo de Souza, materialises the constructive effort that would animate visual creation in the following decade.

This onslaught was the cultural side of a modernising project, typical of the postwar period, which aimed to overcome Brazil’s backwardness. The debate about what needed to be done for a new insertion of Brazil into an international trade system was intensely contested. It was a rich debate that enlivened scientific, technological, and industrial production, social thought, and the arts. In 1964, that debate came to a standstill and gave way to a conservative, elitist, and authoritarian kind of modernisation. Celso Furtado, one of Brazil’s brightest thinkers of the time, when theorising underdevelopment, realised that the local elites were born modern, and when trying to modernise, always restored backwardness in a more complex way. Thus, social violence was not a by-product of an atavistic past, but a modern way for society to insert itself internationally.

The Black Widow was one of the silent characters in this debate. It was first shown in Brazil in 1948. Shortly after, in gratitude for the efforts of the Brazilian architects in putting on the exhibition and vitalising the artform, Calder donated it to the IAB. The Widow remained in the building until 2017, when it was removed.

Since then, that sculpture, conceived in the United States, saw significant changes: the optimism of the 1950s waned with the dictatorship, but it witnessed heated debates. It was reborn with the “Diretas Já” movement, which was defeated, but won us the New Republic and new hopes. These took different forms until they were fatally wounded with the violent deposition of President Dilma Rousseff in August 2016, almost the same time as Calder’s mobile left the IAB.

Throughout this period, if we take into account the lines the objects say in the film, the Black Widowlived pleasantly, without looking through the window or paying attention to the noise coming from the street. The sculpture is formed of a chain of linear wires with metal paddles attached to their ends. These wire arms swing and rotate in all directions when hung from a hook, to quote the beautiful metaphor recalled in the film. Owner of itself, in control of the action, the Widow danced in different directions, triggering new satisfying and pleasurable discoveries when responding to the touches of the atmosphere, objects, and people. In its sensuality, it made Mário Pedrosa recall music and dance. In the film, however, the hook speaks like somebody who misses sex.

Its spiralling was self-referring, made of lasting, carnal love. The widow who speaks in her delusions remembers sensory pleasures: light, colour, touch, textures, temperature. Deliriously, she asks the hook to imagine if everyone could touch her while she was hanging there, orgiastically.

Therefore, the nostalgia of Jonathan Gall’s deep voice is of a private nature, urgent, but private, which makes it no small thing. Love turns the grapnel dependent on the sculpture’s delicate dance and makes it live prostrated without it. The piece left over cannot think about life from then on. It is melancholically trapped in a past where even the falls, the stumbles are idealised. In fact, the delight we feel before a mobile by Calder has a domestic nature. He is an artist who deals with playful joys, utopias, not conflicts. Perhaps because of this, the melancholy expressed in the film’s dialogues is private. The hook survives the pain of living only by suffering from affective dependence.

The film, in turn, makes us see something bigger. The lack recalls a description by the singer and composer Chico Buarque of this uncontrollable, unpronounceable desire in his song O que será: ‘E que me faz mendigo, me faz suplicar; O que não tem medida, nem nunca terá; O que não tem remédio, nem nunca terá; O que não tem receita’.[1] At the time, the song, in addition to expressing an uncontrollable interpersonal desire, also spoke of the frustration of those who sought to change their lives faced with the narrow limits imposed by the civic-business-military dictatorship. Brazil is experiencing a similar moment, of a shortening of our historical expectations.

The instrumental reason that governs international trade, which increases dividends and imposes austerity on the most vulnerable part of the Brazilian population, is refractory to the most intimate pleasures. Everything must serve a purpose: to meet the expectations of capital. The extreme neoliberal right wants to knock down our doors, tell us how to live, how much we should work, and for whom. Today, even more so than the smallest joys, we understand the right to do nothing as the result of historical struggles. Even the sadness we feel for no longer being able to see the widow dancing.

[1] Chico Buarque de Hollanda in the song O que será (À flor da pele). Originally recorded in 1976, for the soundtrack to the film Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, by Bruno Barreto.

Who are they?

Prior to their stories, it is important to point out the context of the aforementioned person. His craft, let me put it this way, takes place along a flow of ideas that leaves traces of other works on the way, a continuous network of digressions that would make any person, conscious of his process, with the feeling of already being in the middle of a story that started some time ago. If only we could see what is happening here. Let’s be clear about it. Its beginning could be explained with the aid of this work: iron ribbons hanging from a narrow piece of metal. Leads us immediately to the physicality of a flag. Its schematic missing parts lay there as the remaining fragments of a country. We do our jobs and we rebuild it only using our imagination. The latter, is a crucial element in this project: the imagination is ingrained in the very language of his works. In his realm, the incompleteness theorem is shown in iron: a thick iron base, a missing rectangle space, which hangs like a flag on the mast of a sailing vessel resisting, enduring the elements as its iron ingrained nature. 

In the light of a new piece we remain still: columns surround us. In the context of these pillars, the clever eyes won’t see only a hook that emerges from it. The hook is there for this same reason: semicircle, or open circle, shape is full of tension. Its configuration goes far: a crosier, a fishhook, a hanging hook, a sickle, a billhook, a shepherd’s crook, a hook of moon or a serpent’s tail ending in a hook. The secrecy-shrouded landscape opens up before them: the multiperspectivally tensions embrace the boundaries of history. A concrete idea is sought, but to believe one will find it under a simple and straightforward manner is to swallow the bait. Even a hook on the wall, with a drawn circle holding a hook with a piece of the cut wall, serves as binoculars: ways of seeing, of addressing different focus, distance and closeness: magnification: this (alongside cartography) was the first strike capacity of explication that coerced the previously invisible world to become pictorial . And, when we think that its symbolic potential would vanish, we see ourselves before the ultimate tension assembled by the hook: the view from the widow. A video that unfolds around the hook that held Alexander Calder’s work.  

Would the specificity of this project encircle the entire exhibition? This would only be feasible if the grid of rubbers stained with graphite dust wouldn’t allude to the undoubtedly fact that through these lines we would talk about opposites; on the fact that even to erase history would be to do history. The non-realization of the project (encapsulated in the symbolic potential of the eraser) would allow an increasing explicitidiness of stances pro resistance, pro endurance. Across the board, its margins, its lines, we always encounter world-openness: starting from the basic domestic situation (…) the expansion process proceeds from the village to the city, to the empire and onwards to the finite universe until it loses itself in the uninhabitable boundless space.   

The questions imposed in this context have the strength of drawing forth a response: a sort of metallic thread that holds together two unmated substances: a thread that attracts a cut in the pillars that surround us. But, who are they? They are the ones who endure. People, matters, events, doesn’t matter whom or what. Suspended of time, space, causality. In the present time, on its temporal bandwidth, or at the width of your present, your now, we sometimes forget about what we are doing here, at this place. Or, why we should endure the manifestations that only consider the instant. That let the future or the past vanish. Who are they, you ask? They are, and they will be. They endured the weight of movement, the abandonment, the post-war or the post-celebration. They have answered and questioned triggered by the crisis that surrounded them. But, to question is to endure, it is to see that this obscure point that allows us to see, this sun situated eternally below the horizon, this blind spot that the gaze is unaware of, islet of absence in the heart of vision – that is the aim of the quest and the setting, the stake, of the plot . And that was all .

1.  BORGES, Jorge Luis. The Basilisk in The Book of Imaginary Beings. P. 29 (Paraphrased)

2.  SLOTERDIJK, Peter. Spheres. Volume 3: Foams. Plural Spherology. Translated by Wieland Hoban. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2016. P. 75-76. 

3.  SLOTERDIJK, Peter. Spheres. Volume 3: Foams. Plural Spherology. Translated by Wieland Hoban. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2016. P. 16. 

4.  PYNCHON, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Penguin classics deluxe edition, 2006. P. 517.

5.  BLANCHOT, Maurice.On an Art Without Future in The Book to Come.Translated by Charlotte Mandell. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.P. 160

6.  FAULKNER, William. The Sound and the Fury. London: Vintage Classics, 1995.