As she walks through the city, the artist pays particular attention to the little things that go unnoticed by the inattentive eye: simple, discarded objects, found in dumpsters or simply present on the ground or in the shop windows of the neighborhoods she passes through are transformed into erected sculptures or sculptural objects revealed through an intuitive process that borders on performance in its dimension of exchange, collection and assembly.

Whether it’s the use of google maps connection points to get closer to unknown places and create interactions with residents of distant neighborhoods or the appropriation of materials that are sometimes crude and silent, sometimes colorful and screaming, reflecting a popular vernacular, Manuela Costa Lima reveals a unique perception of urban space and its details. She has a particular delicacy that contrasts with the immediate harshness of her surroundings and proposes a poetic reinterpretation of the objects and forms that populate everyday life.

In her research, the artist borrows parts of the vocabulary of arte povera and minimalism to highlight the human experience and the necessary bond between subjects and the space between them, re-signifying through the lens of affection the elements that cross her wanderings, reinventing a more human city.

This particular reading runs through the works in Escape Entropico, as well as the way the artist has chosen to confront and dialog with the exhibition space. In it, a column made of Portuguese mosaics floats. The weight of the stones used on the sidewalks contrasts with the subtle binding, evoking in its structure the fragility and also the unstable balance of every human or material relationship. “Vértebras” dialogues with the anthropomorphic series “Corpo de Baile”, in which stone parallelepipeds closely linked by plastic seals appear to be entwined in a slow dance. In this group of works, the imperfect purity of the stones is repeated, reminiscent of collected souvenirs, the magic that arises when you change your gaze in the face of the unknown, giving life to inanimate objects.

Imperfection also permeates the “Erratas” series, in which Manuela Costa Lima questions the fictitious rigor of industrial stones cut according to an always identical pattern, highlighting the singularities of their surfaces and their possible geographies.

Finally, with “Vínculos”, wooden sculptures tied together by colored fabrics punctuate the silence that has taken over the exhibition space, bringing with their colors a bit of the noise of Brás, the popular district of São Paulo where the artist has set up her studio.

In her works, Manuela Costa Lima talks about the subtlety of the human gesture, its presence in the city, the fragility, precariousness and chaos of life. Fleeing the rational logic of modernist architecture and standardized industriality, the artist seeks subjectivity and freedom in detours, in walks that take her from one corner of the city to another, deconstructing and re-signifying the banal, space and its elements in an entropic escape.

Julie Dumont