By naming her debut exhibition in the United States “Tropical Still Life,” Brazilian artist Manoela Medeiros may have been pretending to play along with an exoticized stereotype. Yet the show, combining aspects of lyrical delicacy and aggressive bluntness, suggested an attitude of indifference to all preconceptions. It centered on four largish paintings—roughly five by four feet, or six and a half by five and a quarter feet, respectively—each titled Still Life (all works 2025) and bearing a parenthetical subtitle.
By naming her debut exhibition in the United States “Tropical Still Life,” Brazilian artist Manoela Medeiros may have been pretending to play along with an exoticized stereotype. Yet the show, combining aspects of lyrical delicacy and aggressive bluntness, suggested an attitude of indifference to all preconceptions. It centered on four largish paintings—roughly five by four feet, or six and a half by five and a quarter feet, respectively—each titled Still Life (all works 2025) and bearing a parenthetical subtitle. These canvases were essentially abstract, but the biomorphic forms they gathered in considerable quantity were summed up in their straightforward subtitles: (Dancing Seeds), (Leaves), (Plants), and (Plants and Seeds). The compositions had a relief-like aspect: Their surfaces were built up of acrylic paste, and the botanically inspired shapes—limned in pale, quiescent hues—had been carved back into this plaster-like material. Seemingly immune to gravity, the forms floated, swirled, and hovered. Possessed of an ethereal lightness thanks to their faint and incorporeal color, they were also locked into place by the forceful lines that distinguished them, at once evanescent and indelibly tangible. But what, one wondered, made these paintings still lifes? There was something too open, too wild here to be confined by the domestic enclosures typical of the genre. Where was the table, the setting at an angle to the picture plane, that would support and display this foliage as an arrangement of objects in space? Even when a traditional still life presents natural objects—flowers, hunks of meat—they are often exhibited alongside (or contained by) human-made things, such as plates and vases, knives and statuary: commodities that pertain to the “slowest, most entropic level of material existence,” as Norman Bryson once said. What Medeiros showed in her so-called still lifes was a vitality that had not, or had not yet, been reduced to this artifactual state. I therefore have to take her use of the phrase “still life” as ironic and contradictory: It refers to a category she is happy to explode rather than extend.
Medeiros’s taste for paradox was more bluntly asserted in Hemisphere (South America and North America), which the artist made by scraping the shape of the South American continent, at monumental scale, directly into the gallery’s Sheetrock wall; on the floor below it, the landmass’s northern neighbor was portrayed by the carved-out scraps. This is more than just a simple upending of the usual image of the Americas, with the north above and the south below; its larger subject is the dialectic of destruction and creation, origin and making: It proposes a dialectical interchange rather than the reversal of a dichotomy, which always leaves hierarchy intact. Other small interventions scattered throughout the gallery—referred to in the press release as “wall excavations” but not listed as works on the exhibition checklist—consisted of simple yet irregular shapes cut cleanly through the walls. By ruining this surface, the artist made something else of it. A larger wall piece, Leaf Sliding Off the Wall, resembled a layer of paint that had been sliced out and pulled forward to meet the floor—though a moment’s reflection suggested that this couldn’t be the case: The foliaceous form bending into the room was much longer than the excised piece of wall. Medeiros is a materialist who can also be an illusionist. She makes everything palpable, even what’s no longer there.