The exhibition “Lua Versus Luta” (Moon Versus Struggle) reflects Jarbas Lopes’s interest in the body at risk, exposing the fragility of the individual in a neoliberal world where subjects are forced into a constant state of submission. Lopes not only takes up precariousness and improvisation as his subject matter, he allows the concepts to shape the formal contours of his work. For a pair of untitled images (all works cited 2023), Lopes smeared vegetable oil on his body and used it to make prints on paper. The resulting silhouettes are somewhat phantasmagorical, with fungus spreading over the surfaces in a prefiguration of a body being eaten away. For Salto (Leap), the artist stacked cardboard boxes high in the street below the gallery. The image captures him flinging himself from the balcony down onto the pile. The reference to Yves Klein in both these works is unmistakable, but the context is strikingly different. Lopes is producing at a time when the left has returned to power in Brazil, following the far-right authoritarian administration of Jair Bolsonaro. By presenting the body in oscillation between an affirmation of presence and an acceptance of corporeal fragility, the artist emphasizes the very freedom and bodily autonomy that have been suppressed in recent years. Unlike Klein, Lopes actually throws himself onto the boxes, confronting risk not as a fantasy but as an act of disobedience. In the midst of terror, death, or desperation, life—for better or worse—makes its presence felt.
Translated from Portuguese by Clifford E. Landers.
— Felipe Scovino