Portas Vilaseca is pleased to present at ARCO Madrid 2025 an intriguing project featuring the latest production of Brazilian artists Zé Carlos Garcia and Kika Carvalho. Through a powerful dialogue between sculpture and painting, the two artists immerse viewers in a universe of inventiveness and enchantment, addressing themes of colonial heritage, cultural hybridity, and transcendent futures.
Zé Carlos Garcia’s sculptural practice merges elements of Portuguese colonial furniture with delicate feathers and plumes, evoking a visually rich world inhabited by fantastic creatures and undefined beings. Drawing from Brazil’s sculptural traditions and his experience with Rio de Janeiro’s samba schools, Garcia’s works materialize as hybrid bodies that embody the tensions and contradictions of Brazil’s colonial past. His sculptures reflect a nation caught between historical trauma and the promise of renewal, symbolized by the white feathers adorning his pieces. These elements suggest both mourning and transformation, inviting reflection on an unresolved history that continues to shape Brazil’s cultural landscape.
In contrast, Kika Carvalho’s paintings offer a visionary exploration of Afro-diasporic memory and speculative futures. Using a striking blue palette as a signifier of Blackness, her works connect with the sacred waters of “Kalunga,” a symbol of protection and transformation in Bantu cosmology. In her latest series, Carvalho interweaves personal and collective narratives, constructing luminous, ethereal compositions where interstellar elements merge with human forms. Her paintings evoke the fluidity of time and identity, as figures seem suspended between visibility and invisibility, presence and absence, offering a path toward transcendence and reinvention.
Together, Garcia and Carvalho create a powerful dialogue between history and possibility. While Garcia revisits the ambiguities of a Brazil shaped by colonization, Carvalho envisions new realms of existence, where memory and spirituality open doors to transformative futures. Their works, deeply rooted in personal and collective histories, challenge traditional narratives and propose imaginative new perspectives on identity, belonging, and cultural legacy.
Portas Vilaseca invites audiences to experience this thought-provoking presentation in the main section – booth 7C30 – at ARCO Madrid 2025, where the artistic practices of Zé Carlos Garcia and Kika Carvalho unfold as acts of resistance, remembrance, and reimagination.
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INFO
Portas Vilaseca at Arco Madrid 2025
Kika Carvalho & Zé Carlos Garcia
Booth: 7C30
05 – 09.03.2025
IFEMA MADRID
Madrid, Spain
