“Any form is acceptable if it is true.

And if it is true, it is ethical and aesthetic.”

(Josef Albers)

“Painting is dead!”, has announced an unknown voice that scatters the news to the four winds in a mixture of excitement and torpor, as in an indigestible déjà-vu repeated in loud and blatant sound. Silence. Everyone seems to hear that enigmatic voice, but solemnly ignore it. Some roll their eyes, others let out small laughs, many do not even pay the slightest attention to the voice that, once eloquent, dissipates amidst the cacophony of a crowd.

The scene is imaginary, of course, despite absolutely believable and recurrent from different moments in the course of the 20^th century to the present day. There are practically countless occasions when painting – and art itself, in general – were considered dead, depleted, outdated and so yonder. Victims of sudden theoretical deaths or ingenious intentional homicides by artists, critics, historians and many more.

Contrary to these multiple (at times hysterical?) aesthetic outbursts that have permeated the most diverse narratives in art historiography, the practice of Dudi Maia Rosa (São Paulo, 1946) seeks to affirm, and constantly reaffirm, his singular commitment to a radical subversion of traditional codes of artistic practice in the field of painting. In other words, as a “painter without a brush”, an alchemist of light, who uses a range of materials that are in no way related to the typical techniques and materials of pictorial work, Maia Rosa could (and should) still be considered a painter par excellence.

Although the vast body of his artistic work has unfolded in different supports and media, the artist has dedicated himself, since the first half of the 1980s, to a production of works that find in pigmented resin and fiberglass, predominantly, their irrevocable, absolute raw materials. Through the continuous and uninterrupted experimentation of these materials in different processes in his atelier, Maia Rosa has become famously known for works that “camouflage” themselves as paintings – even if they do not claim any status or unquestionable classification for themselves either.

They are two-dimensional surfaces (paintings, canvases, all right), of different scales, sizes and colors, usually fractured, wandering, pointed, aware of their voids and flaws. Pictorial objects, receptacles of light, boxes of color, things-paintings, creatures that are not austere or intransigent, peacefully resting on the walls without any fear of judgment or of the innumerable sensations that they could arouse in those who regard them in strangeness or in those who observe them fixedly, in a state of visual semi-hypnosis, crossed by small and delicious chromatic trances.

All Anew displays an unprecedented set of about thirty works, presented and gathered here in an innovative way within the trajectory of Maia Rosa. Whereas the larger-scale works – in shades of yellow, blue, purple, pink, white, green and beyond – gain space in a game of apparitions that combines light, textures and exuberance; they are works that also coexist with a vast group of other works, in smaller formats, also conceived from the use of resin, but capable of welcoming, in their touchy and sometimes intricate compositions, other materials – of different natures, origins and appearances.

In these small canvases, we see shards of glass, pieces of aluminum, brass plates, ceramic splinters, plastic remains and even tiny objects that fuse with resin, giving rise to noisy and often irresolute compositions. Here we see erasures, scribbles, exposed fractures, remains and traces derived from daily practice in the artist's atelier. However, they are neither previous sketches of other works, nor random assemblages that juxtapose the material surpluses of the artist's atelier.

Neither there are in them, nor in their bigger “cousins-sisters” – more polite and pompous, perhaps – conflicting desires of affirmation before the world that observes them. Perhaps they are, in fact, even more rebellious and impatient, ready to rebuke those who regard them with incredulity, stupefied eyes, or disbelief. Enfant terribles as they are, ready to break free from the walls and take the space by assault, in an unbelievable insurrection of works of art against vain theoretical classifications that still insist on imprisoning them and reducing them in their complexities.

Jocular delusions aside, what Maia Rosa allows us to witness here is the unprecedented encounter between two spheres of his work that, until recently, had been understood by the artist himself as distant and distinct. Works, at first sight, conflicting from formal, conceptual and even affective points of view; personally mirroring the fractures, fears and insecurities of the one who conceived them. An exhibition, after all, is never just about the works themselves, but also about the artist who created them, equally exposed and fragile before the eyes that gaze at him.

In a temporal window that gathers works produced in the last five years, approximately, the artist invites us to an integral experience of fruition of this set of works, however, without seeking to impose a plastered or univocal discourse. Establishing active relationships, we witness both their frictions and material, formal, chromatic and related approximations, and their unsuspected affinities (elective or not) in a fine process of approximations that takes place still in the atelier, but, especially, in the experience of the exhibition space. All Anew, a phrase written – almost erased – by the artist on the shattered surface of one of the small works, synthesizes the formal (and personal, how not?) trigger behind the intentions of the present show: the constitution of an open system of signifiers and signifieds awaiting new layers of significance.

In the exhibition room on the second floor, a punctual sample of Maia Rosa's watercolor production, fruit of observation exercises of his own surroundings, in his house-atelier, shares the space with a TV monitor that shows small videos recorded by the artist himself on his cell phone, where we can see him dancing freely, choreographing his steps through the space of his atelier. It is there, in the location of his day-to-day labor, where success and failure intersect daily, that the artist seems to become aware of a kind of unstable species of his own gesamtkunstwerk, of his total work of art, of the integral synthesis of his artistic practice.

Dudi Maia Rosa knows – any artist knows – that it is necessary to face the atelier, day after day, crossing its questionings and doubts that will insist on populating the thick fog of each one's thoughts. Maia Rosa knows that it is really necessary to do it all anew, always, facing oneself and one’s ghosts, conceiving one’s beautiful and complex beings of light and shadows; creatures that will continually recreate themselves and their own author.

All anew, once again, another yet yonder, and thus forward.