Organic references such as the human body are evident in the work of Henrique Oliveira, but his hybrid art also involves a spatial occupation with the epidermis of enigmatic creatures that have the physiognomy of surrealist monsters (and one image passed down through cinematographic imagination is that of the deformed animal that appears at the epilogue to Fellini’s masterpiece, La Dolce Vita, identified as an allegory of the transhuman nature that so deeply perturbs the film’s protagonist).

Monsters can appear in any place, yet assume greater scale when seen in enclosed spaces (such as the stuffed whale in a container in the film Werckmeister Harmonies, by Hungarian Béla Tarr, or the fly-man trapped in the laboratory in Cronenberg’s The Fly).

Hélio Oiticica may have been the first reference for Henrique’s installations, boxed in by hoardings, commenting on the precariousness of the constructions in the periphery of major urban centers, but his interest in Gulliverian creatures arose from his contact with the 80s generation (Nuno Ramos was his teacher, and Ângelo Venosa).

Other influences on the artist’s early processes (his first solo show took place in 1998) include Frank Auerbach’s “impasto” paintings, Tunga’s alchemical processes, the tension between materials in the works of Ernesto Neto, and the ecological recycling of Kracjberg. Auerbach’s painting at that time focused on details in everyday landscapes that went unnoticed by passersby.

In terms of Auerbach’s work, what most interested the Brazilian artist was how the details of ‘impasto’ could become a ‘landscape’ when amplified under a magnifying glass. He was an explicit “expensive reference” for his Xilempastos in wood.

And, in Henrique’s own words, his Tapumes, created from recycled construction hoarding, had been objects that obstructed the gaze, yet became the focus of the viewer’s attention.

The enigmatic beings in this exhibition arise from drawings in Henrique’s sketchbooks. Previously they were born as three dimensional forms on the surface of paintings. Now they dispense with this chromatic streak that emerged from the structure according to the organic shapes suggested by these pieces.

These are large scale works that start out from microforms transfigured into macroforms, organic installations that refer as much to Antediluvian creatures and outer space as they do tumors (he is an aficionado of medical books, in particular those that refer to skin disease and carcinomas).

In addition to medical books, science fiction informs, albeit indirectly, the morphology of the works in this exhibition. It is possible to identify in more recent works a tenuous connection with the monstrous creatures of Swiss artist H. R. Giger (1940-2014), in particular those from the film Alien, and more remotely, creatures from dystopian cyberpunk literature. However, the primordial source of these works lies in the legacy of Surrealism and Freud.

There is, in Henrique’s Pantagruelian creatures, a latent eroticism also present in the sculptures of Louise Bourgeois who considered art to be a sort of alternative psychoanalysis, another portal to the unconscious.

Following the example of Louise Bourgeois, Henrique is familiar with the syntax of psychoanalysis, although seldom refers to it, unlike Louise Bourgeois. Although she made use of Freudian theories, Bourgeois alleged that Freud was not a great help to those who make art, thinking instead that being an artist, by necessity, had to involve suffering (without access to a cure, the artist affirmed this following 30 years of analysis).

In Henrique’s current work one does not encounter a direct correspondence to Bourgeois’ perturbed relationships and the paternal figure that led her to give works names such as The Destruction of the Father (1974), marked by the symbolic castration documented in many of her sculptures. There is, however, a curious evocation of the rounded forms that hint at testicles in Bourgeois’ aforementioned work which relates to the seeds aggregated to Henrique’s “monster” in the largest piece installed in this exhibition, sitting on the leaves of palm trees as if they were the eggs of the “xenomorphs” of the Alien, creatures from outer space that develop like reptiles.

In the artist’s first solo exhibition at Millan in 2012, Henrique showed the work Condensation, the title of which refers to the Freudian term that describes the work of dreams (condensation and displacement).

In this tentacular new work by Henrique there is an erotic appeal as strong (yet not as explicit) as his installation The origin of the third world, presented at the 29th Bienal de São Paulo (2010), in which the public entered through a passage in the form of a vulva and passed through a tunnel in a metaphorical allusion to Courbet’s canvas (The Origin of the World, from 1866), which even Lacan, who owned the work, was reluctant to show.

It seems clear that Henrique’s work also poses an enigma of a Freudian nature, without ruling out any sensual suggestion, despite not being “penetrable”. It is a work that calls for a phenomenological key, whose appearance in the world overcomes the antagonism between image and matter, reinforcing perception as a bridge for deciphering this “enigma”.

The vertical organic structure of the exhibition also impresses, exposing the urban skin like a resurgence of his Bololô (2011) in a more ordered and uniform manner, but with the same force that engages the architecture as if it were a fossil emerging from the depths. Amidst monsters and fossils, Henrique surprises by pointing to new paths for three dimensional art in Brazil, just as Ângelo Venosa did before him.

An important reference for this new exhibition by Henrique was a book by Juan Luis Arsuaga, The Neanderthal's Necklace, in which the Spanish author and paleoanthropologist describes an imaginary world 100 thousand years ago in the North of Spain in which our ancestors hunted animals using flint tools. The visitor will encounter references to mammoths, volcanos and bonfires. Naturally, through the gaze of a contemporary artist tuned into his time. Have a good time-traveling trip.