Gisele Camargo: candeia: Curatorial Text: Miguel A. López

The recent work of Gisele Camargo unfolds two complementary lines of inquiry that run in parallel and gradually converge. On the one hand, it investigates the materiality of color: the way in which color emerges before us and actively shapes our sensory experience of the world. On the other, it explores the intangible energies that connect celestial bodies with the territories and forms of life that inhabit them. Camargo is a painter of both the visible and the invisible, of what becomes physically manifest and what remains imperceptible, fully aware that these two dimensions are never truly separable but instead constantly interwoven.

This encounter between the chromatic and the sidereal emerges from a process developed over several years, which began to crystallize after her relocation to the Serra do Cipó nature reserve, near Belo Horizonte, in Minas Gerais. Surrounded by waterfalls, canyons, rock formations, and endemic species of the Brazilian Cerrado, the artist was invited by the landscape itself to reconsider the foundations of painting. Rather than treating the environment as a motif to be depicted, Camargo began to approach it as a system of forces and conditions that make perception possible in the first place. Her interest gradually shifted from representation toward the investigation of the very conditions under which seeing, sensing, and knowing occur.

In this sense, her recent work does not aim to reproduce specific scenes or recognizable landscapes. Instead, Camargo asks how color appears and what determines its manifestation. Light does not behave uniformly across different environments; it changes according to geography, atmosphere, altitude, humidity, and seasonal variation. Likewise, color cannot be understood as a fixed or self-contained property of objects. Perception itself is shaped by both physical and cultural conditions: we learn to distinguish certain hues, intensities, and contrasts because the environments we inhabit render them meaningful and socially legible. Color thus ceases to be a stable attribute and becomes instead an event—an unstable vibration that oscillates between sensory experience, scientific observation, and poetic speculation. It is precisely in this instability that Camargo situates her practice.

Her new exhibition is conceived as an exploration of the influence of astral bodies on perceptual and material conditions. At the two ends of the gallery, the artist has installed two large-scale polyptychs, Luna Cheia and Luna Nova, one dominated by darkness and the other by an intense luminosity. Each work emerges from a meticulous chromatic investigation aimed at translating the subtle variations of light associated with two opposing moments of the lunar cycle: the new moon—when the Moon is positioned between the Earth and the Sun, rendering it virtually invisible from Earth—and the full moon—when the Earth lies between the Sun and the Moon, allowing the lunar surface to appear fully illuminated. These astronomical alignments have historically been associated not only with observable physical transformations, such as tidal movements and biological rhythms, but also with cosmological interpretations in which many Amerindian nations recognized moments of manifestation of sacred energies.

Both polyptychs are constructed as grids of suspended circles against a flat background. Through delicate tonal gradations and carefully modulated chromatic sequences, Camargo explores the shifting qualities of lunar light, as if each painting were attempting to register phenomena that typically elude human perception. The monumental scale of each work introduces an additional dimension, evoking the magnitude of the powers associated with the Moon and its decisive role in structuring the rhythms of the living world. 

The choice of the Moon as a central motif is not incidental. It is the celestial body that has accompanied the artist in Serra do Cipó, becoming part of her daily experience of inhabiting that landscape. Rather than functioning as a distant entity, the Moon appears in Camargo’s work as an active participant. In this sense, the artist positions herself in a space where, rather than observing a landscape, she attends to a dense network of relations and interdependencies. Her paintings do not represent the Moon as an isolated object; instead, they seek to make tangible what is activated through its presence, even when such processes remain beyond immediate perception.

On the largest wall of the gallery, positioned between the two main polyptychs, Camargo has installed four medium-format paintings. Each contains sinuous, undulating forms that emerge against a darkened background. Like fragments of nocturnal vision or perceptions extracted from the vastness of the cerrado, these serpentine figures conjure multiple possible readings: vegetal silhouettes, water currents, seeds, animal shadows, spiritual beings, magnetic fields, or atmospheric phenomena. Camargo deliberately resists fixing their identity, as her interest lies not in classification but in the evocation of forces that exceed linguistic determination.

These figures seem to emerge from the tension generated between the two polyptychs, positioned at opposite ends of the space. As if the installation itself were staging a speculative encounter between the new moon and the full moon—two states that in the lunar cycle remain always distinct and temporally separated—the paintings operate within a logic of simultaneity rather than succession. What is being proposed is not a literal or physical impossibility, but a suspension: a pictorial space in which discontinuous phenomena are brought into proximity.

It is significant to observe how this exhibition extends and reconfigures Camargo’s broader visual vocabulary of abstraction. In her earlier exhibition, Erosões (2019), the artist directed her attention toward the geological processes that slowly shape the Earth’s surface beneath our feet. Rocks, sediments, and the traces left by rain, wind, and erosion appeared as material inscriptions of time, articulated through a language of geometric structures that nonetheless retained a sense of physical and spectral residue. In that body of work, Camargo was concerned with the deep time of matter and the silent transformations occurring within the ground itself.

Her current paintings do not abandon this inquiry but rather expand its scale and direction. If Erosões explored the operations of geological time, the present work shifts its attention toward systems of interdependence that extend beyond the Earth itself. The movement is not a rupture but a dilation: from the geological to the astral, from eroded matter to gravitational and luminous forces that traverse space, from layers of soil to cyclical configurations that exceed human temporality. In this displacement, Camargo invites the viewer to consider forms of awareness that are not centered on the human subject alone.

Ultimately, Camargo does not paint only what we see, but the conditions that make seeing possible. Her practice traces relations and registers vibrations across materials and space. Between light and gravity, her work opens onto a continuous field of experience in flux—simultaneously familiar and strange, stable and unstable, perceptible and elusive.