In Flora Rebollo’s drawings, the centrifugal forces present in her work seem to condense to extract the essence of the images in a direct, often more figurative way; revealing a range of her pictorial vocabulary, like a kind of cabinet of curiosities made up of associations of gestures, images and talismanic objects belonging to the artist. In this private library, everyday things coexist alongside cosmic elements organized in a sequence in which chronologies are confused, animals that look like letters or chairs dialogue with striped beings, clocks mimic the solar star and geometric edges embrace the spiral curves of the universe.

In the paintings, on the other hand, the pictorial elements are more macro and spread out on the canvas, as in the case of Caranguejeira, whose body spins out of the painting like a spittoon spreading to all corners. Made up of strips of canvas sewn together, the work is reminiscent of the fusion-confusion between the concepts of creator and creature in the Frankenstein story. From her own skin to the space of the canvas, the handprints stamped by the artist materialize the work.

In this dimension of blurred boundaries, where the form touches the formless and the physical limits between the body, the work and the surrounding space disappear; the set of paintings, drawings and sculptures-objects presented by Flora Rebollo reminds us that it is from the absence of contour that the primordial world is born, a vortex that can swallow everything, even the most distant galaxies, to regurgitate them in new arrangements and start all over again in a self-anthropophagic act of creation and destruction.

In its coming and going of ideas and images, and its passages without hierarchy from the macro to the micro, Dadá’s First Day mimics the flow that takes place in the studio space and in the artist’s mind. In contrast to the expansive spatiality of previous exhibitions, O primeiro dia de Dadá (Dadá’s first day), whose title is inspired by the artist’s childhood book, Dia a Dia de Dadá (Dadá’s Day by Day), brings us closer to the intimacy of everyday life on a very human scale, a scale of daily notes collected over time. Thus, Dadá’s First Day shows, in an almost domestic mirror context, the gesture, the matter and the pleasure of making. Flora Rebollo thus reveals the successive unfoldings of the creation of a visual language: from the first babbles to the most complex associations, organized and disorganized by one hand – a single spiral.

Julie Dumont