Racha/duras, fissuras

In this artist’s writing, I investigate the conceptual operation of racha/dura in the paintings of Garotas, garotas (2023), presented at BDMG Cultural in 2024, through the connection proposed by Maria Angelica Melendi between my work and conversation pieces, a genre of group portraiture from eighteenth-century England. I ask how racha/dura manifests formally and materially and how, through it, the tradition of representing groups and sociability is displaced by the experience of sapatão collectivities. In dialogue with Débora Pazetto, M. Pacor, and Monique Wittig, I draw on the concepts of in/visibility, sapabonde, and rebuceteia, and relate the original photographic archive to pictorial tradition. I examine format, montage, framing, gesture, color, matter, fragmentation, and figure-ground relations. I argue that racha/dura operates as a pictorial procedure, producing fissures in stabilized modes of representing bodies, bonds, and sociability, and creating friction with tradition without rejecting it, cracking it and germinating in its crevices.