Chico Buarque’s “Construção,” his masterful 1971 protest song, speaks bitterly of a worker’s sacrifices in making possible the vertical progress of a great modern city in the tropics.1 For the latest work in his “Visceral Songs Series,” on view at Ateliê Fidalga, Carlos Aires has translated—or transfused—the score of “Construção” into a screenprint colored with his own blood. A living work on paper, it functions both as a record of the artist’s own offering and an invitation for the viewer looking at these burnt sienna notes, which darken as hemoglobin oxidizes, to think about what they have constructed of themselves and their society.
São Paulo is not unique among the world’s metropolises, in that as the pace of construction accelerates across the city, so does the rate of homelessness. As the demands on artists to produce content likewise increases, it is perhaps not surprising that so many of the shows in the city’s galleries during the Bienal de São Paulo are preoccupied with slowing, obstructing, or defeating that “progress.”
Away from the hustle and bustle of the neighborhoods with the highest density of galleries, Barra Funda and Jardins, an artist has replaced the paintbrush with a pneumatic hammer. The intention is not to build, but to deconstruct. For “Urania: uma novela, um entretenimento, um meme, uma ficção,” shown across Luisa Strina and Marli Matsumoto Arte Contemporânea, Renata Lucas dug a triangle in the latter’s garden, intending to encrust it with blue tiles and thereby generate the effect of a strange swimming pool. The surprise came when, during the excavation, she discovered the remains of a previous pool of which there was no record. She improvised by juxtaposing fragments of the new and old pool to create a tribute to Brazilian concrete art of the 1950s, the same period as the elegant modernist building that houses the gallery was constructed.2
Beside it, Lucas has planted a small and perfectly square patch of sugarcane.3 If there are no sugar plantations in the city, it is only because, while the capital has an excess of many things, water is not one of them. Seeing this clipping transferred from the heartlands and placed next to a dried-up swimming pool reinforces what the country is bringing upon itself to secure the future of its wealthiest metropolis: drought and deforestation.
At Galatea Gallery, a small painting in ink and brush pen on board arrests my gaze. A sack of cement, a ladder, and a shovel are fragilely outlined in black; beside them in the picture, on a piece of canvas or paper wrinkled to resemble the dunes of a desert, appear several brightly colored miniature camels. Here the construction elements are in black-and-white, and the fantasy of the natural world in color. This is one of the works in the series “Cotidiano” (1974–84) by Wilma Martins, who grew up surrounded by the lush landscape of rural Belo Horizonte before moving to Rio de Janeiro. The series suggests a longing for the wildlife of her childhood: lions, seals, and crocodiles appear between the pages of notebooks and newspapers, or inside a desk drawer. The artist’s imagination allows her to slip not only the prison of domestic life to which so many Brazilian women of her generation were confined, but also the urban sprawl of Rio in the 1970s and ’80s.
Domesticity and female desire find a different expression in Valeska Soares’s installation Calling (2025), part of her exhibition at Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel. It is composed of a long living room table over which hovers a bronze bell that is rung by a hidden mechanism. Surrounding the table are bronze sculptures of domestic tools—a broom, a brush, a squeegee—and a series of paintings (“Blindface,” 2025) showing the back of discarded female nudes, cut and folded so that only a fragment of the picture on the other side (such as a pair of breasts) is revealed. In this surrealist vision, a prudish upper-class living space is transformed into the scene of explicit eroticism and violence.
A further reminder that a house is not necessarily a safe home is provided by Ivan Grilo’s “cheguei, cheguei. lar, lar, lar” at Zipper gallery. Grilo has deconstructed the interior of a house and suspended what remains on the gallery wall, including a chair, a bed, and a table. Written on bronze or linen, shopping lists and lyrical phrases appear: “the house as a body, a small design is enough, writing is like building a house.” Like the other standout exhibitions coinciding with the opening of the Bienal, the show evokes the way that a culture and a city is constantly being constructed and deconstructed, always knocked down to be rebuilt. These processes are effected by its workers, artists among them.
One of Brazil’s most celebrated songwriters, Chico Buarque abandoned a career in architecture to dedicate himself to music.
“São Paulo é a cidade que mais cresce no mundo” (São Paulo is the fastest-growing city in the world), proclaimed the slogan for the 4th Centennial celebrations in 1954. That decade saw dizzying cultural and economic growth, marked by the rise of skyscrapers and the enrichment of an upper class with the means to build swimming pools in their São Paulo homes.
Sugarcane was imported after the arrival of Portuguese colonists. Brazil is now one of the world’s largest producers, resulting in constant deforestation.
