antonio manuel_ circuit / break

30 oct_2025 - 24 jan_ 2026

circuit / break

Tiago Mesquita

Antonio Manuel frequently draws upon a classical opposition within visual culture: that between expressive actions and structurally organized spaces. This approach is manifested in works where he inserts disruptive murmurs into the carefully laid-out pages of newspapers, ruptures walls and canvases, or uses contrasting symbols and colors to fracture the uniformity of the surface. Something seems to pulse beyond the orthogonal order of his objects.

This kind of contraposition is also a recurring theme in the very constitution of art history as a discipline. Over the years, many authors have mobilized such binaries to account for different phenomena — whether to describe tensions within a particular poetics, stylistic divergences between artistic schools (such as the Florentine and Venetian Renaissances), or to trace broader shifts in the language of art over time. Thus, various thinkers have opposed line and mass, drawing and color, composition and expression.

Such dynamics are also present in the works on view in Corte Circuito [Circuit/Break]. The pieces engage with a similar tension, although it may be more accurate to say that, in Antonio Manuel’s case, order and structure appear as interdependent forces.

Here, the artist presents two series and a distinct installation. The first is Incontornáveis [Inescapables], a group of paintings made on newspaper sheets featuring hand-cut slits. Alongside these, there is a series of reliefs created from metal grids combined with rectangular colored plates. Finally, the exhibition includes an installation in which the artist arranges images inside a round fiberglass container filled with volatile, slightly corrosive liquids: Até que a imagem desapareça [Until the Image Disappears].

In two of the works, the imagery of the printed news is the central theme. The artist returns to a subject that has sparked his imagination since at least 1968. In earlier pieces, he made use of the newspaper’s institutional and diagrammatic structure as a vehicle for visual poems that engaged with the murmurs of the news. These were absurdities that infiltrated newsstands during the times of governmental censorship in Brazil, seeking to shock through paradox. His interventions acted as a rupture in the repressive circuit of normalization enforced by the dictatorship. At the time, print media was the most common and trusted means of communication. By inserting delirious, cryptic, and clandestine reports into the stream of information — as he did throughout the 1970s — Antonio Manuel was, in effect, inoculating a censored country with its own poison.

Since he started his Incontornáveis series — whose production began in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic —, his relationship with the printed newspaper has changed considerably. The medium no longer holds the centrality it once did, though it remains significant. Yet, during those grim years of infection and denialist governance, it played the role of messenger. For many — fearful and unable to see any light at the end of the tunnel — it was through the daily news that we remained connected to the world. With life on hold, we watched horror unfold and recalled our immediately preceding lives, as if fumbling in the dark. That moment had a sunset-like quality. The structures of modern social life seemed to dissolve definitively, leaving nothing to hold onto. Antonio Manuel’s work engages this experience through a gesture of obliteration and revelation.

The artist intervenes on a folded sheet of newspaper. The front page is sealed off — painted in a single, uniform color: yellow, red, black, or white. That flat, monochromatic surface is then pierced by restrained yet expressive holes, torn into the paper by hand. Through them, we catch glimpses of text, graphic smudges, and photographs on the page behind. These are fragments of data and information, traces of a world that lies beyond the obstruction — beyond the blinding pulse of the color field that places itself between us and the phenomena around us, like a screen or barrier.

The work reveals a tension between the contemplation of the foreground and the fractured information in the background. The openings connect two seemingly dissociated aspects of our experience: one that takes place in front of us, the other behind the scenes — yet still haunting us. This association is enabled by the fissure that tears through the surface. The expressive gesture does not dismantle the structure; rather, it links it to other events, placing it in a state of perpetual crisis.

In reliefs such as Matema and Dia a dia [The Everyday], Antonio Manuel — through a similarly restrained yet expressive gesture — partially disrupts the grid that structures the work. Colored plates overlap or interpose themselves within the lattice. Some lines are broken. Once fractured, the structure begins to suggest other relationships. There is a palpable sense of tension, as if the plates were being pushed forward and pulled back simultaneously — held within a taut yet unified surface. Thus, the rupture does not result in a tearing apart of the plane, but rather reinforces its problematic nature — something that positions itself before events in a state of tension and contradiction.

In the Incontornáveis, the association becomes more poetic, literary. Color and contemplation function as a frame for the remnants of experience, spectacularized in the form of news. These are vague traces of tragedy, resistance, and memory — elements that risk being lost if we do not find ways to articulate, represent, or organize them as thought and sensation. Perhaps for this reason, the surface of the work does not break apart, but stretches and strains, revealing not a radical experience, but fragments — residues — that emerge when the artist places color, word, and image in tension. The experience is interstitial.

In Até que a imagem desapareça, even those mediated indicators of experience dissolve — just as the evidence of events is overwhelmed by the flood of online news. We witness the future as a time of corrosion. What remains is the need to recount what happens to one another, so that we are not buried as well.