"There is no feeling that transports you to exuberance more strongly than the feeling of nothing."
— Georges Bataille, Erotism

On the sidewalk in front of Millan gallery, the sound installation Funk-fuck-funck² unexpectedly introduces the public to Vanderlei Lopes’ exhibition Visita íntima [Intimate Visit]. The sounds mix with the noise of Fradique Coutinho Street, as though the soundtrack of reality is malfunctioning. From the somewhat indistinct jumble of noises emerge snippets of conversations, humming, outbursts, sighs, steps, sirens, barks, motorbikes, cars, helicopters, and music. The material was recorded in 2020, during the most critical moment in the Covid-19 pandemic, when the artist, isolated in his studio, secretly recorded people who, through choice or necessity, continued to circulate on the streets. He was interested in hearing what was pulsing in the midst of the atmosphere of death and the feeling of an error in the system. In Funk-fuck-funck, the intonation of voices and vocabularies are like failed acts. The dialogs do not tell stories but communicate anxieties without intentions. Superimposed over the sounds of the present, the work creates an impression of displacement that, in a way, characterizes the whole exhibition.

Visita íntima, a title that alludes to private meetings in prisons, suggests circumstances charged with affection. Composed of a varied collection of bronze sculptures and Funk-fuck-funck, the exhibition mixes what common sense tends to separate — exceptionality and banality, eroticism and religion. In dialog with the exhibition space, the works interfere with the flow of visitors and the architecture. It is not by chance that the exhibition coincides with a renovation of Millan, since the installation of some of the works — especially Espelho [Mirror], which weighs about five tonnes, demands a radical and high-risk intervention in the architectural structure of the gallery.

Mirrors are seductive and dangerous objects. They usually have perfectly smooth, reflective surfaces, with an ethereal and transparent appearance that magically form the perfect image of what lies in front of them. Vanderlei Lopes’ sculpture, however, first impacts the visitor’s body with its weight, density, and volume. At first, the figures that compose the work are indiscernible, recalling an all-over painting. Gradually, it becomes possible to identify a plethora of phalluses, vaginas, assholes, legs, feet, breasts, heads, arms, and arms that overwhelm the visitor’s gaze. The rococo-style frame, made from polished bronze, the same material as the mirror, contains an explosion of naked bodies, submerged in the same amalgam. The heads are buried in the flesh, with the exception of the faces of two women, whose features convey a mixture of ecstasy and pain, like Bernini’s Saint Theresa. At times, it is difficult to differentiate between the figures, steeped into one another, in successive penetrations. The living image of those who move below the piece gives the scene a fleeting appearance. Even so, the object has a feeling of unity, of continuity. The bodies recall those eternalized in Pompeii by the eruption of Vesuvius in the year 79. In an intentionally confusing way, Espelho reflects our faces and our bodies in a scene of an orgy.

Visita íntima begins with a sound piece but it is about the act of looking. The works on show, mirrored or not, discuss the fundamental relationship between aesthetics and sexuality; they demonstrate how observing an artwork can imply anguish and desire, prostration and pleasure. According to Bataille, only religion, eroticism, and poetry are capable of returning to us the feeling of unity that we lose at birth, and that is only restored in death³. In bringing eroticism and religion together, Vanderlei Lopes goes beyond the rational and normative, highlighting the importance of the gaze in desiring and political beings.

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1. Excerpt from the text that will be published in full in the exhibition catalog.
2. All the works in this exhibition where made in 2023, although some of them existed as planned projects beforehand.
3. Georges Bataille, O Erotismo, São Paulo, Arx, 2004, p. 40.