“In part we are art. In part, technique.”

Announced, still in the year 1978, the unmistakable highs of Gal Costa’s voice, while intoning the song “Acende o crepúsculo” – “Light the twilight”, then composed by the siblings Marina Lima and Antônio Cícero, devotees of whom is, to date, one of the greatest muses of Brazilian music. It is right in the opening verses of the song that Marina and Cícero have ruthlessly concluded one of the greatest issues related to artistic work, since art has been art – or even before it was bestowed with such a pompous designation.

During more than six decades dedicated to his artistic production, Dudi Maia Rosa (São Paulo, 1946) could not have endorsed Marina and Cicero’s statement more fully, amplified to the four winds by Gal Costa’s mythical voice in the 1970s. Although the field of contemporary art has considerably unraveled the endless possibilities linked to artistic labor (in the field of theoretical research, in the numerous and successive attempts of death of traditional supports such as painting and sculpture and so on…!), fact is that the artist’s work, roughly speaking, little has changed. It is a process of strenuous experimentation, dedication and repetition of whatever the artist is working on, in practice, and in the day-to-day coexistence of his atelier.

In his most recent solo exhibition, Tudo de Novo / All Anew, presented in Millan Gallery, in the city of São Paulo, between August and September 2022, Maia Rosa has conducted a creative process in which he could broadly dribble – overcome? – certain impasses of an aesthetic, psychic nature, and of whatever our brains and hearts could handle. There, in partnership with the vision and ideas of the one who speaks to you, discreetly keeping myself in the sphere of curatorship, works from different generations, supports, formats and moments in the artist's career gave life to a powerful set of works, whose affinities, at least a priori, were not so easily recognized by the artist.

Between shadow and light, trash and luxury, plastic gimmicks, glass, acrylic and other materials, they coexisted with the grandeur of the artist's widely famous works in polyester resin and fiberglass produced since at least the 1980s. Although the beauty and individual strength of the works were truly unquestionable, the real click that worked as a mystical trigger for the exhibition process there, was the permission – whether voluntary, involuntary, forced, risky…! – that the works should seek, among themselves, their elective affinities, their radical differences, their unsuspected complementarities. “All Anew” did not sound, for the public or for the artist, as an exercise in the order of automatism: against the grain of a world whose imperative of productivity has blinded and anguished us, Maia Rosa was certain that he was in his natural habitat, surrounded by creatures that are so familiar to him, as children, as pieces of his own body. What was needed was to see them anew, with clean eyes, pure ears, enjoying, to a large extent, the extended time allowed by the interim of the covid-19 pandemic.

PLAY-DELAY – in all caps, like a song announced with univocal fervor and animation, amid a party that seems to be only reaching the halfway point, although it has long enjoyed the certainties of its peak… without abandoning the many hardships of the day-to-day artistic practice, we know – it suggests a moment in another instance of renewal, different from the one we have just witnessed and, certainly, also different from whatever is to come on the horizon of the artist's production.

PLAY: Dudi is just getting started, the dance is long, the room is vast, the joy is casting out nines, tens and 1001 admirers of the artist, always eager to witness his next step. DELAY: there is also here, of course, the awareness of time, its impossibilities, the pain and doubt that the passing days carry with them and would never easily drift away as resin dust, or also cosmic dust, stardust, thin dust that represents those who are no longer here to dance with Dudi his new choreography, his new choreo-politics, his affirmative and irrevocable gesture that life shall continue to be lived and work shall continue to be wallowed. In mud, in chaos, in the asepsis of the soft white walls of white cubes, in the half-light of the house-ateliers that the artist shares with his cherished woman, Gilda Vogt Maia Rosa (an artist with her own unfading light). PLAY: now, loud, full music, jammed room, smiles from ear to ear, life is one and so is this moment. DELAY: it is never too late for nothing (allow me, in the heat of emotion, to use a certain demagogue slogan!?), the dance floor is only a dance floor when the pieces fit together, rise, one by one taking on a life of their own, from the ground to the heights, sparkling, shining, gleaming. Silently and loudly reaffirming their need for being there.

Play – play one more song! play Tim Maia! – yet with some lag – we are expecting the delay! – do not leave the floor empty, occupy it, shout, smile, stare at the translucent walls, thick in the mysterious lightness of matter that only Maia Rosa knows how to manipulate. He invites them: dance, keep dancing, you no longer know where the pause button is, the symphony must go on…! The symphony of days, as the brilliant chronicler João do Rio would say, and the symphony of art, of artistic labor; that mysterious chemistry reserved for the great men and women, for the generous and the fearless, for the artists, ultimately. Dance! Dudi Maia Rosa is indulging in the core of the dance floor – do not leave him alone, please! Play, anew, one more time, with delay, that is, without pause, let us play. Let it play.