Time, for Waltercio Caldas, is a material of his practice. This is the premise underlying "o (tempo)", an exhibition bringing together approximately 100 works produced between 1967 and 2025 by one of the most influential figures in Brazilian contemporary art, on view from May to September 2026.
Exhibitions by this artist are always met with great anticipation. Beginning with the title itself, the word tempo appears here in parentheses. The graphic mark interrupts the word’s fluidity and anticipates the idea that runs throughout the exhibition: “The parentheses indicate something…,” notes Waltercio Caldas (1946, Rio de Janeiro). “They suspend time as a measure and present it as a material of language and thought.”
Designed by the artist himself, the exhibition occupies the institution’s spaces in Cosme Velho, in Rio de Janeiro’s South Zone, with sculptures, paintings, drawings, books, and environments spanning six decades of production and revealing the consistency of a rigorous investigation into the tensions between form, space, and perception.
For Waltercio, the exhibition is a constitutive part of the work and another stage in its realization. The arrangement of the pieces in space, the distances between them, and the visitor’s path are all integral to the process of constructing the experience. “Making an exhibition is still a prerogative of the work itself,” states the artist. “When we work with sculptures and objects, space becomes the material, and the exhibition becomes radically present.”
"Quarto Azul" (2007) opens the exhibition route. In the first room, the environment envelops the visitor in a field of color crossed by lines that reorganize the perception of space. From this point of entry, works from different moments in Waltercio’s career begin to coexist in new configurations, producing continuous shifts in the viewer’s gaze.
By bringing together works conceived at different points in time, "o (tempo)" brings historical pieces into proximity with recent productions, revealing the continuity of a poetic mode of thinking that challenges conventions of form and space. Among them are emblematic works such as "Condutores de Percepção" (1969), one of the first to explore the active participation of the viewer’s gaze; and "Centro de Razão Primitiva" (1970) and "As Sete Estrelas do Silêncio" (1970), which already pointed to the formal precision and poetic dimension that would become recurring hallmarks of his production.
Waltercio emerged on the Brazilian art scene in the late 1960s, at a moment of intense renewal in the country’s visual arts. In dialogue with artists and critics who were rethinking the boundaries of sculpture, the object, and the idea of the work of art, his practice became part of a shift that moved the focus away from representation and toward perceptual experience and a questioning of the media of art. Since then, his career has been closely followed by critics such as Paulo Venancio Filho and Paulo Sergio Duarte, who identify in his practice a rigorous investigation into language, perception, and space.
Throughout this trajectory, Waltercio has developed a body of work marked by formal precision and economy of elements, establishing a singular and coherent language. Working with materials such as stainless steel, glass, mirror, stone, and wire, the artist creates situations in which presence and absence, transparency and opacity, weight and lightness are delicately balanced. This practice, which runs throughout his oeuvre—from the first objects created in the 1960s to his more recent sculptures and environments—has established him as one of the central figures in contemporary sculptural thought in Brazil and on the international art scene.
Focused on the experience of looking and the materiality of the invisible, his works construct spatial situations that invite viewers to move through them attentively, activating a perceptual field in which each element acquires meaning in relation to the others. “What I seek is this tension that exists between the things we know and those we do not know,” the artist reflects. “Art is the invention of an appearance. It makes things emerge before us as if they were capable of altering even our doubts.”
At Casa Roberto Marinho, "o (tempo)" transforms the visitor’s movement through the exhibition into an essential part of the experience conceived by Waltercio Caldas: “There seems to be a similarity between the periods, the places, and the raw materials,” states the artist.
