Everything That Moves
EVERYTHING THAT MOVES
There is something that precedes form: a silent impulse that makes things grow, breathe, expand, and transform. Before anything becomes permanent, there is movement. Life manifests itself less as a state than as a continuous process of change, in which every organism, every material, and every gesture carries within itself the potential for transformation. As the philosopher Henri Bergson wrote, life is kinesis and cannot be understood as a succession of fixed states, but rather as a creative flow that never repeats itself in exactly the same way. It is within this dimension of becoming, in which birth, growth, decomposition, and renewal belong to the same cycle, that the exhibition “Everything That Moves,” on view at Galeria Frente, takes shape. The exhibition brings together ten artists whose practices reveal that every form emerges from invisible forces that pass through matter. In the works, organicity reveals itself through expanding forms, structures that evoke cellular bodies, rhythms that compose nature, and the forces that connect matter and space. Each work demonstrates that to live is to remain in a state of permanent movement, transforming through countless layers that make variability the very condition of existence.
In the works of Diana Motta, forces that normally escape the eye become visible. Her paintings suggest currents of energy, organic formations that dissolve the boundaries between body and nature, matter and atmosphere. Each canvas emerges from an unrepeatable process, in which paint follows its own rhythms of expansion, sedimentation, and encounter. The surface becomes a living, rhizomatic field, turning the work into a translation of her rich spiritual universe into physical form. If, in Diana’s work, these forces move through matter and make the boundaries between body and nature porous, in Efe Godoy’s work they take shape in the very indistinction between species. In his images, no form remains intact for long; everything seems to move through a continuous state of transfiguration, in which species, bodies, and landscapes share the same sensitive matter. Efe constructs a universe in which hybridity is not an exception, but a natural condition of existence. Rather than simply depicting metamorphoses, his work reveals that remaining alive may mean precisely never fully coinciding with oneself.
In Fabiana Preti’s work for this exhibition, movement emerges as an event. In her series Chorinho, the title evokes the tradition of Brazilian popular music, bringing different forms of cadence into proximity. Brushstrokes, repeated through variations in color, density, and transparency, are organized like a visual score, establishing rhythms, pauses, and tensions that make the surface vibrate. Painting becomes flow: it pours into a field where the eye follows the time inscribed within it, making movement the very substance of the work. Pouring is also the verb that runs through Poli Pieratti’s practice, not only as a theme, but as a way of thinking about and constructing painting. In Fundo do mar and Onda I, both from 2025, figures and landscapes appear subject to the unstable nature of the liquid element: contours dissolve, lines advance across the surface, and forms emerge only to transform once again. The artist finds in flow a way of dissolving boundaries. Here, to move also means to cease being one thing in order to become another: like water itself, painting exists as passage.
Giulia Bianchi’s practice shifts the gaze toward the relationships that constitute the living world. Among structures that evoke leaves, fruits, animals, and organisms, her paintings employ synesthesia as a method, expanding the experience of painting beyond vision and calling upon memory, touch, scent, and imagination. Each work invites the viewer to perceive that living also means continuously responding to what surrounds us. This permeability between what we see and what we experience takes another form in the paintings of Victoria Serednicki. If Giulia brings different forms of existence together within the same relational field, Victoria dissolves the boundaries that organize the landscape itself. In her paintings, sky, earth, water, and vegetation emerge through patches, gestures, and fields of color that seem to be constantly forming and dissolving, making the boundaries between one element and another uncertain. In Qual o limite entre o céu e a terra? (2025), this indeterminacy already appears in the title: rather than representing a landscape, the artist is interested in perceiving what within it is impermanent.
In Thamiris Mandú’s sculptures, the earth preserves what time holds onto. Clay ceases to be merely material and becomes an archive of gestures, ancestralities, and stories that pass through the body, as suggested by the philosopher Gaston Bachelard. By mixing different types of clay, the artist investigates belonging, displacement, and memory, transforming ceramics into a territory where identities remain in constant formation. Fire, far from bringing the process to an end, becomes a passage, revealing that every material preserves within itself the marks of the forces that shaped it. It is also through the capacity of matter to transform through encounter that Naia Ceschin develops her practice. If, in Thamiris’s work, earth and fire record successive transformations, in Naia’s work it is threads, paints, and their interweaving that allow form to gradually emerge. Colored threads and paint intertwine across surfaces that grow before the viewer’s eyes, as if each gesture extended the one before it in a continuous process. Between tapestry and painting, the artist constructs landscapes that oscillate between the microscopic and the geographic, bringing cellular structures, vegetal forms, and memories of nature together in compositions that never fully settle.
For Marysia Portinari, movement emerges from the relationship between color, light, and geometry. Engaging with the tradition of geometric abstraction and approaching the optical investigations of Op Art, the artist constructs compositions in which the surface seems to pulse before the viewer. Lines, planes, and chromatic fields produce perceptual shifts that allow the painting to oscillate. It is precisely the viewer’s movement that brings her practice closer to that of Verena Smit. In both, the work does not reveal itself all at once: one must move for something to happen. While in Marysia’s work this movement alters the perception of color, light, and form, in Verena’s it transforms the very meaning of words. In the series presented in the exhibition, lenticular panels cause pairs of words, such as Fugir/Agir and Desesperar/Esperar, to alternate according to the movement of the viewer’s gaze. There is no definitive reading: each small change in position brings forth a new meaning, revealing that between one word and another there is a fertile interval where decision, time, and perception merge. The work thus becomes a shared experience.
In Everything That Moves, different artistic genres and media reveal life as a field of relationships. Metamorphosis, rhythm, flow, impermanence, matter, and perception run through these practices as different manifestations of movement. As anthropologist Tim Ingold observes, life takes place in a world of materials in formation, where nothing remains still because everything continues to be in process. The works brought together in the exhibition invite the viewer to follow this incessant flow, recognizing that every configuration contains within itself the forces that brought it into being, as well as those that continue, silently, to transform it.
Participating Artists
Diana Motta, Efe Godoy, Fabiana Preti, Giulia Bianchi, Marysia Portinari, Naia Ceschin, Poli Pieratti, Thamiris Mandú, Verena Smit, Victoria Serednicki
Curator: Ana Carolina Ralston
Works on Exhibition
