Viagem à Aurora do Mundo

From a sensitive and critical journey emerges a voyage. An invitation to collectively reflect on the ecologies of living through the works of Celaine Refosco.

Like a bright horizon illuminated by the dawn of ideas, the artist's studio shapes itself as a complex ecosystem: it is a place of creation and reflection, but also a space for coexistence and cultivation. Her home and workspace are indistinguishable, and entering them immediately reveals that Celaine Refosco's involvement with art is inseparable from her commitment to the world. The studio-house inhabits a plot of land that has been carefully recovered by the artist, a restoration planted, germinated, and built layer by layer, rich in diversity, detail, and depth, just like her paintings.

The artist's process comes with other investigations and productions: from the  ecological forays of Alexander von Humboldt, the fortuitous encounter with Érico Veríssimo’s literature — whose book gives this exhibition its title —, to the scientific understanding of natural phenomena, all these elements are articulated in the poetic making and adds to her experience in the landscape.

The exhibition is an invitation to a joint journey. Visiting it involves throwing yourself into a stream of water and air, travelling through territories and temporalities, also becoming a landscape. Inhabited by a profusion of colours and multiple beings in connection and confrontation, "Voyage to the Dawn of the World" presents the paintings and drawings of Celaine Refosco that occupy different supports: from colour stacking to immersive installations, from the surface of paper and canvas to fabrics that evoke the fluidity of rivers and the passing of time.

Her work is in flux, in intense movement: it expands and retracts, assumes figuration and then returns to abstraction, explodes at dawn and does not hide its shadow, rises to the surface and plunges into the depths, imposes itself and occupies space only to suddenly become a vestige. It employs the monumentality of large formats without losing the sensitivity of small things. The exuberance of this poetic territory does not separate from the complexities of living and stems precisely from a critical and radical immersion in the world. Here, beauty is treated as an irrevocable gesture of resistance to be cultivated, recovered, and reclaimed, as a revolutionary power to dream and build what we desire.

The exhibition simultaneously follows the fluency and singularities of Celaine Refosco's works. The exhibition route is an invitation to a fluid passage, with multiple entrances and exits, yet there are also pauses and breaths that allow attention to each work. Three works act as stopping points, like stones that support us when we traverse a river. These are recent works, all produced in 2025, in which concepts and procedures central to the artist pulsate. 

Coexisting with the works are expanded captions and thought-provoking questions questions that do not serve a merely educational function, but rather instigate the visitors' bodies and thoughts.

The first of these works is "Latitude - 16.7672, Longitude - 39.1424," a geographical coordinate that leads to Caraíva, on the southern coast of Bahia. This was one of the first landing points of the Portuguese colonial advance over Brazilian territory. The painting proposes a reflection on our memory and history and results from the artist's immersion in this locality, its colours and waters, its environmental and cultural diversity, preserved above all thanks to the struggle of the Pataxó people and local communities.

In "Flying Rivers - Forces," an unprecedented work created for the exhibition, the artist experiments, for the first time, with broader and faster gestures that go from one canvas to another, creating a sequence of paintings like rivers in confluence. Affected by the power of natural phenomena such as the flying rivers originating from the Amazon, the series bursts forth with the intensity of waters, windstorms, lightning, and volcanoes. The mural seems to move with the thunderous force of currents, as in the waters of the pororoca, a Tupi word that holds an originating resistance which remains in the language and in natural phenomena.

While many of Celaine Refosco's works evoke the strength and exuberance of life, the installation "Landscape" stems from a reflection on what limits the experience of the world. Many processes exhaust vital energy, generating bodies without desire, inserted in devastated environmental contexts and inhospitable cities, controlled by regimes of exploitation and colonialism. In this work, floating bodies are grouped and superimposed in multiple layers of transparency; their depths create reliefs and landscapes. The installation is completed by the bodies of visitors who become part of this landscape as they walk through it, evoking the power of cooperation and exchanges that remain indispensable to the beauty and depth of the human experience.

To turn toward the dawn of the world is to locate its beginning, its principles. It also means realising its current state, acknowledging its finitude and extinctions, identifying and combating thoughts of domination that could lead the planet and all its inhabitants to extermination. Above all, it is an encounter with origin and affiliation forces that drive us not only to recover interrupted paths of thought and interaction, but to reimagine futures, since the dawn of other worlds is always about to burst on the horizon.

We thank the Santa Catarina Art Museum (MASC) and the Catarinense Culture Foundation (FCC) for hosting this exhibition. This catalogue has the important mission of not only recording and creating memories about this exhibition, but also proposing other relationships with Celaine Refosco's work in new journeys that are now unfolding as you leaf through the pages.