Fabiana de Barros | Imagens do Interior

Luciana Brito Galeria is pleased to present Fabiana de Barros – Imagens do Interior [Fabiana de Barros – Images from Within] in the Modernist Room. Brazilian artist Fabiana de Barros, who has lived in Switzerland since 1985, returns to Brazil with an entirely new body of work resulting from ten years of research. The exhibition invites reflection not only on self-perception, but also on the possibility of recognizing humanity and vulnerability in a culture shaped by self-image, technological mediation, and constant performance.

Fabiana de Barros – Beleza Interior

Opening – August 22, from 12 p.m. to 5 p.m.
On view through October 17

Fabiana de Barros – Imagens do Interior

Fabiana de Barros uses prints, collages, mineral-resin assemblages, and installations to explore the notion of “inner beauty” not as a moral value, but as an unstable field between ethics, image, and subjectivity. Against a cultural backdrop marked by the aestheticization of life and the continual fabrication of identities, Imagens do Interior calls into question the boundaries between subjectivity, image, and collective experience. Although subjectivity is commonly understood as a private core, Barros also treats it as a relational field, continually shaped by encounters with others and by the systems of representation that permeate contemporary life.

At the center of the exhibition is the installation Você acha que a gente pode ser o jogo e a regra do jogo ao mesmo tempo? [Do You Think We Can Be the Game and Its Rules at the Same Time?], 2026, created in collaboration with Swiss filmmaker Michel Favre. Occupying the garden designed by Roberto Burle Marx, the work features holographic projections on fans positioned throughout the space. Amid images of atomic explosions and probing questions such as “Could suffering be a tool for building inner beauty?” the installation creates an atmosphere of perceptual instability in which technology, memory, and collective imagination intertwine.

In the same setting, Beleza Interior [Inner Beauty], 2026, a large wood-and-aluminum armchair conceived as a space for lingering and experience, revisits a proposition Fabiana de Barros first developed in Geneva in 2008. On that occasion, she staged Concurso de beleza interior para um piquenique antropofágico [Inner Beauty Contest for an Anthropophagic Picnic], announced through a public call inviting participants to nominate people whose gestures, behavior, and qualities revealed signs of “inner beauty.” Ten candidates were selected to take part in a process symbolically inspired by the modernist anthropophagic ritual: standing before a jury, each presented to the group what was most valuable about themselves – their own subjectivity.

Engaging with Oswald de Andrade’s formulation in Manifesto Antropófago [Cannibalist Manifesto], 1928, anthropophagy appears here not as an act of violence, but as a process of assimilation, exchange, and transformation of the other. Visitors are invited to sit in the “inner beauty chair,” shrouded in artificial mist as part of the installation, and enter an experience of self-examination and perceptual suspension. In this context, the gallery itself – a former modernist residence designed by Rino Levi – becomes part of the work, extending the connections among ritual, memory, and the collective construction of subjectivity. To provide context for the installation, Barros also presents documents, images, and other materials related to the original 2008 artistic happening.

This debate about inner beauty, which runs through the entire exhibition, could only have taken shape through Fabiana de Barros's own creative process – and, by extension, her particular universe as an artist. In the series Imagens do Interior (2020), which gives the exhibition its title, meticulously layered paper and collage form small assemblages that evoke fragments of landscapes, like pieces cut out for a visual alphabet. “Imagens do Interior are drawings I've made for as long as I've existed. I give form to the actions of everyday life,” the artist says.

The role of association in shaping perception also emerges in the series Paisagem [Landscape], 2020. Forms cast in mineral resin are removed from silicone molds and used as foundations for successive layers of pigmented resin, giving each work depth, texture, and density. Using the same technique, Fabiana de Barros presents Próximos Fantasmas [Nearby Ghosts], a new group of five small-format works brought together in a single installation. Here, the ghost serves as a metaphor for the invisible presences that permeate human experience. Barros turns the installation into an allegorical field of affective resonances, where personal and collective ghosts coexist and mirror one another.

Fabiana de Barros’s practice reflects a Gestalt understanding of the image as an experience in continual reorganization, with meaning and form emerging through the relationships among fragments. From this perspective, her research resonates with concerns that also shaped Brazilian constructivism, an active presence in her formative years as an artist: the idea that the whole arises not simply from the sum of its parts, but from the perceptual and sensory relationships established among them.