Estilingue

Slingshot is more than a name. Behind this object, commonly known as a children’s toy, operate the concepts of a program whose purpose is to give visibility and support to the formation of young artists, promoting the insertion of new voices into the art market. This object teaches us—far too early—the intimate relationship between creation and destruction, between play and power. It is an instrument of projection and rupture.

The curatorial focus of this first edition is dedicated to painting, taking the fertile Belo Horizonte art scene as a starting point to reflect on the pictorial medium in its contemporaneity. In a city that hosts two major public art schools, a consolidated museum scene, and the seminal presence of Inhotim, painting remains a territory of intense fermentation—an environment that has allowed me to closely follow the consistent development of the artists gathered here. Far from any notion of exhaustion, contemporary painting asserts itself precisely through its ability to absorb the world and return it as an open question. Painting is, in itself, a slingshot: it carries the memory of tradition and gesture, the courage of rupture, and the precision of what must be said.

In an international context marked by digital speed and the growing assimilation of artificial intelligence in creative processes, pictorial practice reaffirms itself through bodily gesture, the physicality of matter, and the unique temporality of its making. The selected artists were chosen for developing consistent research and are at particularly rich moments in their trajectories—building the foundations of their visual discourse, maturing, and progressively freeing themselves from the multiple references that dialogue with the long pictorial tradition to which they belong. The weight of this tradition does not appear as ballast, but as an anchor—a way of preserving the sensitive before the virtual, turning painting into a territory of resistance amid the complexity of the contemporary. More than a linguistic choice, the option for painting manifests here as a critical stance. These artists remain in continuous construction—a process this exhibition seeks to strengthen and make visible.

The proposed selection does not aim to define a “Belo Horizonte painting” but to reveal, from the local scene, the vitality of young artists who stretch the limits of the medium. The selection is organized into interchangeable thematic nuclei that function as provisional constellations, mapping poetic intersections and dialogues. This structure aims to make visible the diversity of investigations coexisting within the same creative space-time, where traditional classifications give way to fluid transitions between the figurative and the abstract, between representation and pure material event, and between the expanded field and linguistic intermediality.

In the Abstractions and Quasi-Abstractions axis, traditional classification dissolves. Unlike the programmed ruptures of the 20th-century avant-gardes, the deconstruction of form here arises as an organic unfolding of individual research. Although apparently non-figurative, many of these works maintain a visceral connection to the observed world, operating as “semi-abstractions” or as new forms of figuration.

The Portrait nucleus reaffirms itself as a field of political and subjective force. Through it, identities are asserted, addressing issues of race and gender while problematizing the condition of the individual in contemporaneity. Meanwhile, the Landscape nucleus emerges as a reconfigured genre, a critical testimony of the world. Urban architecture and its impersonal coldness contrast with the road as a symbol of an exodus in search of place, reflecting unease or existential non-belonging in relation to the spaces we inhabit.

The urgency of the present manifests in the Political Themes and Urban Activism nucleus, where painting assumes a denunciatory character. Scenes alluding to authoritarianism serve as warnings of democratic fragility, while others—those that address the “poetics of today”—challenge the traditional support and claim a place for art in public debate, radically bringing it closer to the world.

Finally, the exhibition expands in two directions that challenge the material limits of painting. Expanded Materialities investigate unconventional supports and materials, privileging symbolic and sensory reflection over representation. Meanwhile, Installations transport painting into the experiential field, creating fictional and immersive environments where the viewer is included in a space of multiple perception—completing the arc that extends from the retinal to the corporeal.

“Slingshot” thus serves as a map of a territory in effervescence, where painting confirms itself as the privileged medium to confront the present and to project, with precision and strength, the essential questions of our time. 

Alan Fontes, October 2025

ESTILINGUE
1st Edition: States of Painting
October 4 – November 8

Artists:
Abraão Veloso
Alanis Margarita
Bárbara Elizei
Bárbara Ferreira
Cavi Brandão
Fernanda Gontijo
Fernando Moreira
Gabriela Carvalho
Heitor Fernandes
Iago Marques
Lucas Matoso
Riel