Gustavo Silvamaral, funny bitches, 2025, oil, cotton tow, 3 crystal glasses, 19 glass ampoules with a cigarette each, glass ampoule with a cigarette smoked by Denilson Jr, aluminum, steel, linen and wood, 71 x 44.5 x 19 cm
2025. Gustavo Silvamaral
At first, the works in Gustavo Silvamaral’s exhibition Alive reminded me of Yuji Agematsu’s devotional and disciplined sculptures, recently exhibited at the Judd Foundation and at Gavin Brown’s residence in New York, made from street detritus inside cigarette-pack cellophane sleeves and displayed on shelves as a calendar. Then I realized they are almost from opposite worlds. Agematsu’s gatherings are the findings of a reserved artist who wanders the city as an aesthete flaneur collecting souvenirs, while Silvamaral’s quest is less disinterested: He is obsessed with collecting the detritus of wild queer parties, as though to evoke a revelry that never ends. He then works these fragments in his studio with the same intensity as the boisterous raves.
His works combine several intriguing elements in paintings with collaged-on three-dimensional objects: funny bitches (all works cited, 2025) presents Camel cigarettes smoked by friends during parties, carefully sealed in blown-glass capsules and systematically numbered to identify who smoked them. Sometimes, as in redevu 3, such glass capsules are also filled with finely shredded aluminum, suggesting the festive look of glitter and the pittance of sharp waste to be recycled. The thrifted champagne glasses and crystal pendants featured in two untitled works evoke the image, lyricism, and assertiveness of Leonilson’s Traidor (Traitor), 1991, with its handmade embroidery and crystals sewn like beads onto the surface. The works always somehow follow a geometric configuration, which seems to be the effect that Brasília, the city where the artist was born and lived until last year, still has on him, thanks to its architectural modernism, urban superblocks, spatial rationalism, and Neo-Concrete logic. However, it also seems that Silvamaral is constantly trying to bend the rigidity of this traditional geometry in a concerted effort to guard his affections, as if looking at melancholy and loneliness and trying (or choosing) not to embrace them.
Silvamaral’s use of wood is decisive in breaking conventions around what is traditionally understood as a frame, just as the other elements attached to a piece push beyond the limits of painting—or boundaries in general. Once again, in funny bitches, wooden slats outline and connect three rectangular canvases into a single work, even serving as the base for fastening the steel wires, rings, nuts, and bolts that support the drawing formed by the glass capsules. Projected into the foreground, these capsules further emphasize the work’s three-dimensionality.
The need to transform neglected and sometimes remote places into relatively safe meeting points for nonheterosexual love, or to convert insalubrious places into stages for queer celebration, was addressed repeatedly in the exhibition. In the painting This is not a romantic image (second act), many champagne glasses are attached to the canvas by steel wires and hang with teardrop-shaped glass pendants, while in the sculpture im gonna drink my tears tonight, a little fountain with an aluminum bucket and a crystal glass hangs from the double-height ceiling of the gallery space. The tangles of oil-dyed stained cotton rags covering the rectangular canvases, while referring to the dirty side of the painter’s studio, also allude to the comfort zones found by queer people amid this debris. Just thirty years old, Silvamaral retains the experimental vivacity of youth, but with the concentration of a mature artist.
Text originally published in Artforum, vol. 64, no. 4, December 2025
His works combine several intriguing elements in paintings with collaged-on three-dimensional objects: funny bitches (all works cited, 2025) presents Camel cigarettes smoked by friends during parties, carefully sealed in blown-glass capsules and systematically numbered to identify who smoked them. Sometimes, as in redevu 3, such glass capsules are also filled with finely shredded aluminum, suggesting the festive look of glitter and the pittance of sharp waste to be recycled. The thrifted champagne glasses and crystal pendants featured in two untitled works evoke the image, lyricism, and assertiveness of Leonilson’s Traidor (Traitor), 1991, with its handmade embroidery and crystals sewn like beads onto the surface. The works always somehow follow a geometric configuration, which seems to be the effect that Brasília, the city where the artist was born and lived until last year, still has on him, thanks to its architectural modernism, urban superblocks, spatial rationalism, and Neo-Concrete logic. However, it also seems that Silvamaral is constantly trying to bend the rigidity of this traditional geometry in a concerted effort to guard his affections, as if looking at melancholy and loneliness and trying (or choosing) not to embrace them.
Silvamaral’s use of wood is decisive in breaking conventions around what is traditionally understood as a frame, just as the other elements attached to a piece push beyond the limits of painting—or boundaries in general. Once again, in funny bitches, wooden slats outline and connect three rectangular canvases into a single work, even serving as the base for fastening the steel wires, rings, nuts, and bolts that support the drawing formed by the glass capsules. Projected into the foreground, these capsules further emphasize the work’s three-dimensionality.
The need to transform neglected and sometimes remote places into relatively safe meeting points for nonheterosexual love, or to convert insalubrious places into stages for queer celebration, was addressed repeatedly in the exhibition. In the painting This is not a romantic image (second act), many champagne glasses are attached to the canvas by steel wires and hang with teardrop-shaped glass pendants, while in the sculpture im gonna drink my tears tonight, a little fountain with an aluminum bucket and a crystal glass hangs from the double-height ceiling of the gallery space. The tangles of oil-dyed stained cotton rags covering the rectangular canvases, while referring to the dirty side of the painter’s studio, also allude to the comfort zones found by queer people amid this debris. Just thirty years old, Silvamaral retains the experimental vivacity of youth, but with the concentration of a mature artist.
Text originally published in Artforum, vol. 64, no. 4, December 2025
Gustavo Silvamaral, untitled, 2025, oil, cotton tow, 2 crystal glasses, glass ampoule with cigarette smoked by Vall Lloveras, aluminum, steel, linen, and wood, 35.6 x 34.6 x 12 cm
Gustavo Silvamaral, redevu 1, 2025, oil, glass ampoule with cugarette, glass ampoule with crushed aluminum, linen, aluminum, steel, and wood, 22 x 20 x 14 cm