MEU QUINTAL É MAIOR QUER O MUNDO

 

The exhibition features works by Albano Afonso, Amorí, Ana Paula Sirino, Andy Villela, David Almeida, Diego Mouro, Eduardo Berliner, Heitor Dos Prazeres, Fernanda Galvão, Leticia Lopes, Lucas Simões, Luiza Gottschalk, Marina Hachem, Mauricio Adinolfi, Mauricio Parra, Mauro Restiffe, Paula Scavazzini, Rafael Chavez, Sandra Cinto, Vânia Mignone, Yohana Oizumi, Zé Carlos Garcia, and Zé Tepedino.

 

The word quintal [backyard] evokes the idea of something small. It’s a space preserved deep in the memory of the Brazilian dwelling, intrinsic to our culture despite its distant Roman origins. This small piece of land, often paired with a garden or vegetable patch, has become essential to all kinds of homes, emerging from the adaptation of the rural dwelling and agricultural activity. 

 

As a threshold between public and private, interior and exterior, rural and urban, the backyard is more than just a physical space. This small territory between a person’s dwelling and the world bears a powerful image of day-to-day events and commonplace things. Dreams germinate, small beginnings sprout, and everyday routines lose their hold in this place where a wide range of activities break the rigidity of daily life. 

 

Its greatest magic lies in how it is actually a flipside version of the street, a place sheltered from view but open to the sky. Here hands and feet make contact with hard-packed bare ground, while the sun, rain, and wind directly touch one’s skin. The backyard is a meeting point between the earthly and the ethereal, a place where we whisper secrets to the stars and imagine previously undreamed-of futures. 

 

Like a cabinet of curiosities, the backyard arises from a gathering of memories. Here old treasures and ordinary sundries find their place – the bicycle that was once our companion on adventures now coexists with wash basins, while clothes hanging on the line converse quietly with garden plots of vegetables and flowers. Among stored objects accumulating dust and warm feelings, amid traces of simple moments, the backyard becomes a space where time slows down for contemplation. There is something about its very nature that beckons us to linger over things that would otherwise seem too small to matter. 

 

The exhibition Meu quintal é maior que o mundo [My Backyard is Bigger than the World] takes its name from a line by Manoel de Barros, published in his poem “O Apanhador de Desperdícios” [The Catcher of Squandered Things]. In an age when eyes rarely pause to observe their surroundings, the writer invites us to suspend our forward march and take careful note of small and seemingly insignificant things. To build his backyard, Barros carefully chooses each turtle, stone, and insect, creating a space where imagination, memory, and reality interweave.  

 

His poetic operation reveals deep connections between studio work and backyard cultivation. In the backyard shaped by each artist, time defies the hurried pace that consumes our days. Again and again, artists welcome what lives at the fringes, giving center stage to unexpected beings and things. 

 

The group show now at Casa Triângulo explores the backyard as both an objective theme and a concept, bringing together artists from different generations. Through four exhibition sections, it reveals different ways of understanding what a backyard can be. 

 

The works featured in the show reveal the backyard as a territory where the commonplace meets the sublime, where the present exists in dialog with memories and future possibilities. Here the smallest things find their voice, and time seems to fold back on itself. As spaces of encounter between the private and the collective, these artists’ backyards transform the raw materials of the world, opening gaps through which we can glimpse the extraordinary in what was previously invisible.

 

Priscyla Gomes