Tropical Still Life

Palo Gallery presents Manoela Medeiros: Tropical Still Life.Palo Gallery (New York) is pleased to present Tropical Still Life, an exhibition of new works by Brazilian artist Manoela Medeiros, marking her first solo exhibition in the United States in collaboration between Palo Gallery and Nara Roesler. Bringing together four of her multimedia paintings and signature wall excavations, the show foregrounds Medeiros’s distinctive approach to art making through processes of excavation, erosion, and subtraction. In her richly stratified paintings, Medeiros builds layers of acrylic paste, mineral pigment, and paint, only to carve back into the surface with knives, drills, and industrial tools. Through intense mark-making, she exposes fissures of color and texture that evoke the vitality of organic life—burgeoning flora, seed pods splitting open—while shifting between figuration and abstraction. Her wall excavations extend her painting methodology into architecture. By cutting geometric sections from walls and casting their negative forms, Medeiros transforms clean surfaces into site-specific installations that respond to time and light. In the process, she uncovers hidden strata of pigment, plaster, and paint—hues that cannot be purchased or mixed, but emerge only through the slow work of time, decay, and erosion. These timeworn palettes lend the works an archaeological quality, as if history itself were reanimated through excavation. Walls, like canvases, become repositories of time: layered, weathered, and carrying the memory of what has been built, erased, and rebuilt. Together, the works in Tropical Still Life position painting and architecture as living bodies that preserve traces of the past, situating Medeiros’s practice at the threshold between construction and destruction, memory and renewal. In her practice, Manoela Medeiros (b. 1991, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) articulates an approach to painting that transcends the specificities of the medium, making use of sculpture, performance, and installation work. Pursuing a hybrid framework for the pictorial, Medeiros questions artistic media by going beyond their conventional formats, producing paintings and in situ installations that explore the relationships between space, time, and the corporeality of art and of the viewer. The artist frequently performs direct interventions into exhibition spaces, creating works that emerge from the singularities of the space around her, whether they be material, structural, or in relation to natural and artificial light. With this, her practice attributes a sense of organicity to space, turning architecture into its own body, one that is specific to the experience of art. Through a seemingly archeological process, Medeiros engages with the notion of ruins as a spatial indication for passing time, undertaking a process that reveals what is often left to underlie. The artist scrapes surfaces - such as the exhibition space's walls-, unveiling the layers of colors and materials employed, covered, and thus, forgotten over time. Medeiros seeks to reinvigorate our temporal experience by exhibiting layers -each of which carries the memory of the time when it was created-, and by allowing them to coexist and intertwine. Thus, the artist operates within a liminal space between construction and destruction, foregrounding how they may complement, rather than detract from each other. Medeiros studied at the École Des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage in Rio de Janeiro. She currently lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

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