Movement sustains life. If an organic body is alive, within it lies the restlessness of gesture, of breathing, of existing. For human beings, from the most fundamental act, the beating of the heart, to the exhausting endeavour of running a marathon, it is continuous movement that sustains existence itself. This process becomes more complex when, in organising themselves culturally, human beings settled in places to inhabit and understood that movement between locations would be favourable both to the individual and to the community. For life, symbolically, what truly matters is the constant crossing of spaces, places, sensations, and all the material and immaterial spheres that shape existence.
In Travessia, the artist Beto Fame, a native of Rio de Janeiro now based in London, offers the public a sharp reflection on this latency of life which he himself experiences and bears witness to in his cultural interactions. His artistic path, which began with an expanded practice of painting in public spaces, has in recent years turned towards the construction of works on a domestic scale, without, however, abandoning the urban dimension of his inspirations. If views of small houses and landscapes once shaped the visual lexicon of his paintings, in this series we encounter a refinement of form: matured in structure, the image now relates not only to the artist’s affective memories but also to what he projects as a realisable utopia.
The real, which can be found in the midst of the crossing, as Guimarães Rosa once wrote, emerges in the ways the artist builds his images: at times by overlaying layers of colour, at others by interspersing fragments of buildings, objects and natural elements such as plants, fruits, visual and sensorial findings gathered along the way. The principle of layering, superimposed as if creating a pictorial collage, mirrors the idea of a path, a journey in which, at each point of the road, a fragment of recollection is collected, thereby consolidating an imagetic memory of displacement, or rather, of the Travessia.
We also perceive that this collage-like gesture has become decisively incorporated into the artist’s pictorial practice, shifting his palette and opening space to new signs. Tropical colour, once vibrant at high frequency, has given way to deeper greens and earthy tones, as though absorbing the London mist and the hazier rhythm of the new landscape. The tropical fruits that emerge amid organic planes become signs of identity and belonging, echoes of a living origin, even at a distance.
Thus, this exhibition by Beto Fame is offered as an invitation to dwell within movement: between gesture and repose, between desire and memory, between what is imagined and what is seen. The paintings unfold in chromatic chords, layers oscillating between figuration and abstraction, between wandering and stillness, between chance and design. In each gathered fragment pulses the certainty that life itself is a crossing, a displacement of time, space, affections and landscapes that shape who we are. Travessia, then, more than a destination, is the persistence of this latent and constant life: a path that does not conclude, but reinvents itself, like melody, at every new step.
Professor Shannon Botelho
Murilo Castro Gallery - Belo Horizonte BR - 2025