To love thou blam’st me not, for love thou says Leads up to heaven, is both the way and guide; Bear with me then, if lawful what I ask;

Love not the heavenly, and how they love Express they, by looks only, or do they mix Irradiance, virtual or immediate touch?

Adam interpellates the angel Raphael on the limits of love, near the end of Book VIII of Paradise Lost by John Milton1

i. Some desire

“… if dirty old Nature could be kept under the proper degree of control (sex left in, streptococci taken out) by other means, the United States would be happy to dispense with architecture and buildings altogether,”2 pondered British critic Reyner Banham, while reflecting on the future of houses and cities in the “second machine age,” with its automobiles, gadgets, information net- works, canned food and disposable products. Banham had visited America in search of new par- adigms for the relationship between humanity and the environment, and by extrapolating what he found in the so-called “American way of life,” he created this great metaphor for much of post-porn, post-AIDS and post-internet sexuality – with orgasms, but without streptococcus (and no exchange of sweat, fluids and pheromones, that is to say).

There is nothing inherently bad about this virtualized framing of desire – still much of what we value in the history of art has been made covertly as a vehicle for some scopic pleasure, whether voyeuristic, concealed, or even sublimated in the field of representation. From the same history of art, however, many examples of the reverse come to light: works that employ devices of rep- resentation to apprehend desire that has consequences, leaves marks, sacrifices energies, marks the flesh. For desire, when practiced as conjunction, creates new senses by bringing together two or more polarities, and simultaneously erodes the stability of these poles, threatens their integrity. As the song says, when your heart is on fire, you must know, that there is smoke in your eyes.3

Read the curatorial text (atualizar link)

Cecily Brown (London, 1969), one of the great painters of today, graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 1993. She moved to New York the following year, getting close to the abstract and expressionist influences of the city, but sometimes satirizing notions of virility from this tradition, exploring erotic questions in painting from a feminine perspective. She has held individual exhibitions at institutions such as the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, (Washington D.C., 2002-03); National Museum of Reina Sofía Art Center (Madrid, 2004); Museum of Modern Art (Oxford, 2005); Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, 2006-07); The Drawing Center (New York, 2016); Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (Santa Barbara, 2018). Lives and works in New York.

Flávio de Carvalho (Amparo da Barra Mansa, 1899 – Valinhos, 1973) distinguished himself as an artist, architect, set designer, writer and engineer. In his youth he studied in Paris and later began his civil engineering course at the Armstrong College of the University of Durham (Newcastle, England), attending in parallel the night arts course in King Edward the Seventh School of Fine Arts. He finished his studies in 1922 and, in that same year, returned to live in São Paulo. In 1931, he performed the controversial performance (avant la lettre) Experiência nº 2. He wrote the text for the play The Ballet of the Dead God, whose staging was forbidden by the police in 1933. His texts led him to be nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1939. His first individual exhibition, held in 1934, was also closed by the police on charges of indecent assault, and reopened a few days later, by court order. In 1956, he presented the New Look in the center of São Paulo – a tropical male suit made up of a nylon skirt, a puff top, a hat and a half trawler with leather sandals – again causing great scandal. His work was part of the 25th Venice Biennial (Venice, 1950); the São Paulo Biennial (São Paulo, 1951, 1953, 1955, 1963, 1965, 1967, 1971, 1973); the Panorama de Arte Atual Brasileira (São Paulo, 1969, 1970, 1971), amongst other exhibitions.

Tunga (Palmares, 1952 – Rio de Janeiro, 2016) graduated in architecture from the University of Rio de Janeiro. In the 1970s, he founded along with artists Cildo Meireles, Waltercio Caldas and José Resende, the magazine Malasartes and the newspaper A Parte do Fogo. His work has developed in several artistic languages, such as video, performance, sculpture, design and installation, and dialogues with science, alchemy and ancestral rites. After his first solo exhibition at the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro in 1974, the artist held individual exhibitions at institutions such as MASP (São Paulo, 2017); MoMA PS1 (New York, 2008); Musée du Louvre (Paris, 2005); Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume (Paris, 2001); Museum of Contemporary Art (Monterrey, 2001); Phoenix Art Museum (Phoenix, 1998); Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; Bard College – Center for Curatorial Studies, New York, USA (1997); Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago (Chicago, 1989); Kanaal Art Foundation (Kortrijk, 1989); Whitechapel Gallery (London, 1989). In 2012, Inhotim Institute (Brumadinho, MG) inaugurated a second pavilion dedicated to his work. He participated in the São Paulo Biennial (1981, 1987, 1994, 1998 and 2013); Biennial of Lyon (2000); Mercosur Biennial (1999); Documenta X (1997); Biennial of Havana (1994); and the Venice Biennale (1982). His work integrates important public collections, such as the Peggy Guggenheim; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; MoMA – Museum of Modern Art; Instituto Inhotim, among others.