Hudinilson Jr.: Ahhh! Beije-me

Martins&Montero presents Ahhh! Beije-me, an exhibition celebrating the life and work of Hudinilson Jr., one of the most radical and visionary artists of his generation.

Immersive in character, the exhibition brings together an extensive group of Xerox panels, collages, sculptures, and a series of paintings on fabric, paper, and wood—works that have never been exhibited before. These pieces reveal a lesser-known pictorial gesture in the artist’s practice, in which the body continues to appear as a surface of inscription, contact, and invention. In an unprecedented curatorial gesture, the exhibition also incorporates elements from Hudinilson’s intimate universe, including personal objects from his home, presented as fragments of an environment where life and creation became inseparable.

The exhibition includes a previously unseen photographic essay by Mauro Restiffe, produced in 2025 in Hudinilson Jr.’s former apartment-studio. More than documentation, Restiffe’s images capture the sensitive atmosphere of the space where the artist lived and worked, revealing the apartment as an extension of his visual imagination.

Highlighting the intersection between the public and private spheres that runs throughout Hudinilson Jr.’s practice, the exhibition title is drawn from graffiti the artist produced on the streets of São Paulo in the early 1980s—provocative gestures that condense many of the tensions present in his work: desire, voyeurism, poetry, marginality, and freedom.

As an extension of this relationship with urban space, a billboard installed on the gallery’s façade presents a portrait of the artist, projecting his presence back into the city and reaffirming his interest in the public circulation of images and in the exposure of the body within the visual field.

Deeply attuned to his time, Hudinilson developed a practice that placed the body at the center of an aesthetic and political investigation into image, reproduction, and identity. Long before digital culture transformed the self-portrait into an everyday gesture on social media, the artist was already using the Xerox machine to register and multiply fragments of his own body. By producing these images through direct contact between body and machine, Hudinilson anticipated a logic that now structures contemporary visual culture: the incessant production of self-images, their repetition, and their circulation.

His practice was not only formal or technological. In a period marked by strong social conservatism, Hudinilson openly assumed his sexuality and made the male body—desiring, vulnerable, and assertive—the center of his work. In this sense, his practice is also profoundly political. By inscribing his own body within images, the artist claimed visibility, freedom, and autonomy in a context that often sought to silence such experiences.

Hudinilson was a rare figure who combined aesthetic radicality, critical intelligence, and an almost dandy-like elegance. Edgy, avant-garde, and deeply free, his practice remains strikingly relevant today. Ahhh! Beije-me is a direct invitation from the artist to the viewer: to approach his work is to enter a territory where body, desire, and imagination become forces of invention and freedom.