Que beleza

Que beleza

Ever tried. Ever failed.

No matter.

Try again.

Fail again.

Fail better.

— Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho (1983)

The project Que beleza was conceived at the end of 2023 with the aim of creating a space for dialogue and reflection around art. It emerged from the perception that Brazil's contemporary art circuit has become at once robust, productive, and accelerated, yet increasingly deprived of the time and space necessary for attention, reflection, criticism, and genuine debate. What is commonly referred to as debate often boils down to the presentation of more or less divergent viewpoints that nonetheless tend toward convergence. The field appears saturated with assertive and prescriptive discourses, leaving little room for doubt or contradiction. It is as though the demands for efficiency that govern contemporary life had also "professionalized" relations within the art world, in favor of high performance, productivity, and profitability without, however, fostering forms of professionalism genuinely committed to ethical conduct and impartial modes of relations.

Everything must be produced, exhibited, and consumed quickly. Young, recent, and previously unseen practices are rapidly absorbed by galleries and museums. Practices long neglected are finally "discovered" or "rediscovered" by curators and institutions, not from a historiographical perspective, but rather through a gesture akin to judicial reparation: a kind of redress that leaves structures of interpretation untouched and thus serves to valorize the judge more than the object of neglect itself. Today, the relevance of an artwork is frequently measured by the themes of its statements and by the immediacy of its presentation, including its effect on social media platforms, some of which have themselves become portfolio spaces. It is a field in which monetary value and the liquidity of the work are the yardstick of its success.

For each edition of Que beleza project, we invite six artists to bring a single work to a day-long session of conversations held at Alexandre da Cunha's studio, in downtown São Paulo.¹ And the activity thus extends, each time, over a single day, a full day. The format proposes the collective analysis and discussion of each work, one by one, in sustained conversation among all participants. Initially, no information is provided other than what the work itself makes visible. The artist is asked, at least at first, not to explain how the piece was made, which materials were used, or through what processes the work was created. The very aim is to encourage participants to interrogate the objects themselves without relying on external data or exogenous elements; to engage in direct, unmediated relationships with the works; and to test what each object is capable of presenting, suggesting, and provoking thought solely through what physically constitutes it. As the conversation develops, however, the details of the making process gradually become part of the discussion and help guide the dialogues.

When selecting participants, and in composing each group for a given edition, we privilege artists working across different artistic languages, circulating within distinct cultural milieus, and belonging to different generations. The idea is to foster new interpersonal encounters and to move away from connections and conversations that may have been established prior to this gathering, allowing relations - between people, but also between people and works ­- to emerge in as naturally as possible, or at least under conditions less constrained by prior affinities, preconceived arguments, or similar factors hindering the emergence of the unexpected. For this reason, it is also common for us to invite people whom we meet for the first time on the very day the activities take place.

Even so, the conversations take place within the private setting of the studio. They are not open to the public, nor are they recorded in audio, video, or transcription. After all, the aim is to place dialogue around the works in the foreground, ahead of the exhibition. The activities are deliberately situated within the space of the studio, within the environment of thought, formation, and experimentation or, if one prefers, within a sphere of informality, outside officially sanctioned contexts. It is about following the thought process of the work still in formation, when the piece may even be physically ready, but remains, during its emergence, at some level of elaboration. In this sense, the project is interested in exposing and discussing the thought process behind the work rather than presenting its results.

After the conversations the studio open to visitors. What the public encounters is something like the residue of that session. The works remain on display, but there is no curatorial discourse attempting to impose unity upon their variety. There is no exhibition design intended to approximate or relate one piece to another. Ultimately, this is not a seminar, and what emerges from it is not exactly an exhibition either. The program for each edition of the project is rounded out by a performance - theatrical, musical, literary, or all of these at once - by another guest artist. Yet this, too, does not transform the gathering into an event. Its scale remains far too intimate for that.

The very title of the project evokes a contemplative dimension for the activity: Que beleza [What a beauty]. Without romantic idealization, this contemplation somehow restores the notion of experience in a tone that is, perhaps, humble. One of openness, surprise, or satisfaction with knowledge, as perceived in the watercolor of the same title by Mira Schendel from 1966, or in the song of the same title by Tim Maia, recorded in 1974 during his so-called "rational" phase. That is it: to stop for a day to look, think, talk, and exchange ideas about the object before which we stand, without this necessarily resulting in an exhibition, an event, or a product. One might ask whether the project's primary material is in fact the counterform of the artwork? Would it be the space around the work, the one that surrounds it? Is it the interval between the work and the viewer's body? And further, might this space constitute a kind of negative area, empty yet constitutive of the artwork itself, since it is there that questions and so many other visions, ideas, and sensations open up?

To arrive now within the space of a gallery undoubtedly implies challenging the commercial space so that it may also become, at least to some extent, a studio. The attempt made here is to enter these rooms with things still in process, perhaps unfinished, without exhibition furniture, without curatorial stitching between the works, placed in ways that are more or less intuitive, more or less considered. It involves engaging with the activities of that space without allowing them to dictate every decision completely. It is about bringing to the market sector an initiative that aims to remain independent, free, and without so many constraints, while having to adapt itself to the nature and conditions of the place while seeking, nevertheless, to disrupt the way the gallery functions and is perceived. We have also reflected on how the project's entry into the gallery, to some extent, reproduces the very dynamics of spatial distribution that lay at the origin of our explorations.

Here at Luisa Strina, the program is divided into two parts. The first consists of the presentation of a group of works by artists who participated in the project's first three editions, held between 2023 and 2024. Midway through this presentation, from May to July 2026, the program will host a conversation with the artist group Vilanismo, which since 2021 has produced performances, installations, workshops, and video projections in public and institutional spaces, primarily in the city of São Paulo. The second part consists of the realization of the fourth edition of Que beleza, in the format originally conceived, though this time taking place within one of Luisa Strina's exhibition rooms.² And from here on, the intentions remain the same, while also expanding to include the desire to broaden the project's voices, reach, and experiences.

— Alexandre da Cunha and José Augusto Ribeiro
São Paulo, May 2026

Translated from Portuguese by Guilherme Ziggy