Installation view of 38º Panorama da Arte Brasileira, 2024, at MAC USP/Photo: Ruy Teixeira

Days after the intense heat waves and fires in large areas of Brazil have cooled down, we have arrived at “Mil Graus” (A Thousand Degrees), a good example of the current Brazilian artistic fervor. Fire and heat lead the thirty-eighth Panorama of Brazilian Art to a diversity of cultural and social issues in different and very well-used media and techniques. The exhibition highlights the artworks and gives light to thirty-four artists, in a long-running tradition in art exhibition, initiated by the Museum of Modern Art (MAM SP), in 1969. The central idea of ​​the Panorama of Brazilian Art is a reflection on urgent issues of the country’s contemporary times. Now the adverse climate effects and social and political conflicts add more fuel to “Mil Graus,” with works that delve into ancestry and also into the future.

Jonas Van & Juno B, “Visage,” 2024, at 38º Panorama da Arte Brasileira “Mil graus,” 2024, at MAC USP/Photo: Estúdio em Obra

At the entrance to the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo (MAC USP), where the exhibition is being held while the MAM SP is under renovation, you will come across installations by Advânio Lessa and Solange Pessoa that evoke the earth and vital energy. Also, in the museum lobby, a large octagonal installation is intriguing because it raises and sinks four skulls covered with laces, by Adriano Amaral, into liquid resin. The future with the face of the past, or the return to origins in the near future, continues in the main hall of Panorama, curated by Germano Dushá, Thiago de Paula Souza and Ariana Nuala. The curators’ central idea for “Mil Graus” is the concept of limiting heat, an allusion to a temperature that melts, dismantles and transforms everything.

Zahỳ Tentehar, “Máquina ancestral: Ureipy” (Ancestral Machine: Ureipy), 2023/Photo: Philipp Lavra

Stones, metals, wood and ceramics dominate the works exhibited on the third floor of the museum, but two video installations reveal the new world of visual arts. Located at the ends of the large hall, and isolated from the rest of the room, the works by Gabriel Massan and the duo Jonas Van & Juno B are immersive and combine sculpture and video in futuristic settings. Massan addresses violence and the drug war in Rio de Janeiro. Jonas Van & Juno B place us inside a deconstructed car, which is a kind of video game. Another highlight in the video is Zahy Tentehar with the “Ancestral Machine: Ureipy,” a video on two channels that shows the actress, screenwriter and indigenous activist herself acting in a fiction that once again mixes ancestry and futurism.

Advânio Lessa, detail of “Energia,” 2015-2024, at 38º Panorama da Arte Brasileira “Mil graus,” 2024, at MAC USP. Courtesy of Gomide & Co/Photo: Edouard Fraipont

This Panorama “Mil Graus” also highlights the spread of sculpture as an artistic medium, especially in installations, and puts some good brushstrokes on the walls. Jayme Fygura, Paulo Nimer Pjota, Lucas Arruda, Laís Amaral and Ivan Campos are the painters in the exhibition who seem to have nothing in common, but who complement each other in the vastness of Brazilian painting. The diversity of points of view leads to complementarity, as the Panorama of Brazilian Art should be, in search of a plural yet universal discourse that is representative of Brazil, the world and the events that permeate and fascinate the lives of these young artists.

38º Panorama da Arte Brasileira “Mil graus” is on view through January 26, 2025, at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo, Avenida Pedro Álvares Cabral, 1301, São Paulo.