Jeane Terra, Navigating (Memory capsule series), 2025.
The creations, which give materiality to the theme of disappearance, present dialogues between painting, sculpture, photography, embroidery, engraving and video art and include the authorial technique ‘Ink Skin’, memory capsules and other propositions.
For the first time in São Paulo with a solo exhibition, Jeane has exhibited in different countries and is part of the collections of the Inhotim Institute, the Rio Art Museum and the Centro Cultural Correios.
Opening the 2025 calendar of exhibitions, Janaina Torres Gallery is presenting the new show Pele do Rio, by Jeane Terra, from March 22 to April 26. The visual artist from Minas Gerais, based in Rio de Janeiro, whose works are part of the collections of institutions such as the Inhotim Institute, the Rio Art Museum (MAR) and the Correios Cultural Center (RJ), and who has exhibited in different countries, is holding her first solo show in São Paulo. She will also be at SP-Arte in April.
In the exhibition Pele do Rio, Jeane’s works give physicality to the experience of finitude, processes of erasure and memory and have as their raw material, layers of the artist’s psyche on the subject, intertwined with the territory of the Amazon rainforest – especially the Jaú reserve and the Anavilhanas archipelago, on the Rio Negro, where the ruins of the city of Velho Airão are located.
The central theme of Jeane’s artistic research is the transience of life and the echoes of memory. Based on hostile and defining personal experiences, such as the death of her family and the demolition of the house where she lived, the artist connects and immerses herself in territories that experience processes of collective loss. In this way, Jeane embodies her own experience and the collective unconscious, materializing states of pain, sadness, helplessness, abandonment, resistance, hope and transmutation in her works. In a kind of Nietzschean eternal return, Jeane embodies in her works the anguish inherent in the processes of disappearance of cities, environments, cultures, biodiversity and, ultimately, of man himself. In her works, materiality translates the ephemeral and the perishable into tangible forms and objects which, paradoxically, reaffirm the pulse of life.
For Pele do Rio, Guilherme Wisnik, the exhibition’s curator, selected 13 works that move between painting, sculpture, photography, embroidery, engraving and video art. The materials alternate between the natural and the processed: Ink Skin (marble, binder and acrylic paint), latex, school rubber, glass, water and even the remains of a tree serve as inputs for the creations. “Anchored in the physicality of matter, which somehow imposes a resistance to the loss of memory and the ruination of things, Jeane Terra gives carnality to the experience of these places so far away from us, here in the Southeast. At the same time, she creates works that play with the sense of inexorable disappearance, like the rubber stamps of ruins whose paint is gradually drying out. And if the dreamlike atmosphere of the film showing the birth of a Victoria Regia emanates an ever-renewed power of life, the tree molded in latex and weighed on a butcher’s scale, as if it were meat, metaphorizes the transformation of the forest into pasture, and its consumption as a sign of death.” Wisnik comments on the works chosen.
Among the techniques, the authorial ‘Ink Skin’ stands out. The alchemical mixture, created by Jeane, combines marble dust, acrylic paint and a binder, resulting in a fabric that alludes to the texture of human skin. For her skin creations, she chooses a photograph from her archive, which is read by a computer program, developed using the cross-stitch technique, inherited from the artist’s maternal grandmother. The program traces a chromatic logic and then Jeane cuts the material into tiny squares, which are sewn or glued onto the canvas. Depending on the angle, the final look resembles a pointillist painting, a pixelated photograph or even an embroidery hoop. With the works in ‘Ink Skin’, Jeane merges her personal and collective pain, reverberating the contemporary dialectic between the weave of ancestry and the human fragmentation reflected in each pixel.
Another medium created by the artist are memory capsules: blown glass containers that hold photographs immersed in water and/or oxygen, in a reference to the cycle of life and memories, where the decomposition of matter creates a fertile field for new forms of existence. Other artistic experiments take on a metalinguistic character, with objects imbued with meaning, such as the meat weighing scale, the stamp, the paint and the latex skin made from the tree that was felled.
In previous works, the artist has delved into contexts where the actions of man and nature feed back into processes of destruction, such as Atafona (a town in Rio de Janeiro that is gradually losing its territory to the sea); the São Francisco River (in the area flooded by the Remanso and Sobradinho dams), the Mekong River in Vietnam (and the installation of hydroelectric dams that change the course of the river and the lives of its residents). Now, in Pele do Rio, Jeane tackles specific territories in the Amazon, continuing her artistic research into finitude. The investigations deal with the relationship between riverside populations and the river’s drought; the memories of Velho Airão – a city that had its heyday and downfall based on the rubber cycle; extraction from the forest in all its facets – conscious or destructive; the mythical universe of the forest; threatened (and resilient) biodiversity and the emblematic Rio Negro, with its dark waters and sacred stories.
In the exhibition, Jeane looks at the local reality of the forest as a magnifying glass for the human experience in contemporary times and touches on the crossroads of our time: the climate emergency and predatory development as catalysts for degradation processes and the imminent annihilation of human living conditions on the planet. The exhibition, which ultimately talks about death, also brings the face of resistance, addressing the relationship of riverside peoples with the environment and the drought itself, as well as their cosmogonies as a way of coping and narratives of hope.
Service
Solo exhibition Pele do Rio, by Jeane Terra
Vernissage: March 22, from 2 to 6 p.m.
Visiting period: March 22 to April 26
Visiting days and times: Tuesday to Friday, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Saturdays, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Venue: Janaina Torres Gallery
Address: R. Vitorino Carmilo, 427 – Barra Funda, São Paulo – SP, 01153-000
Free of charge
All ages
Accessible to wheelchair users
Press Office
Locomotiva Cultural | Nany Gottardi
