Arroz com Feijão, Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo, 2025

Iván Argote’s current exhibition at Vermelho pays tribute to South American popular culture through a critical investigation of the tradition of monuments. Instead of erecting memorials to notable heroes, Argote monumentalizes shared culture using elements whose history was shaped by the re-signification of ideas imposed by dominant cultures.

The reworking of hegemonic narratives begins outside the gallery, in the courtyard, welcoming visitors. In Antipodo: Curupira—a monumental pigmented concrete sculpture 10 feet tall—Argote celebrates Curupira, a figure from Brazilian folklore who protects forests and animals, and who can be read as a critical reworking of the notion of the “antipode” as elaborated by European colonizers.

Since Antiquity, the idea that inhabitants of the Southern Hemisphere lived “upside down” in relation to the North was mobilized to sustain a hierarchical and racialized worldview, in which geographic difference was converted into a sign of inferior otherness. The Curupira’s backward-facing feet directly echo this logic of inversion but shift its meaning: instead of a sign of inferiority, they become a mythical strategy for protecting the forest. As he walks through the woods, the Curupira leaves reversed footprints, causing hunters and explorers to lose their way. Thus, what in the colonial reading was a mark of estrangement and dehumanization, in the myth acquires a noble value—cunning and resistance—appropriating and subverting an imposed imaginary to create an entity that inverts not only the feet but also the symbolic hierarchy between colonizer and colonized.

The sculpture stands against the backdrop of the gallery façade, where Argote has created a grand mural combining text and vegetal forms. The image is composed of native plants, such as beans, speculative species—invented by him—and invasive species, such as rice. Invasive plants are non-native species that, when introduced, adapt so well that they spread aggressively. They compete for resources with native plants, which can cause imbalances in the ecosystem.

Amid this hypothetical vegetation, Argote has written “COM A BOCA” [WITH THE MOUTH]. The phrase is split in two parts (COM A above, BOCA below), generating two possible readings. The first (WITH THE MOUTH) refers to eating; the second (EAT MOUTH) to devouring the other. On the scale of the façade, the text becomes a motto or slogan, in which eating can be read as the anthropophagic possibility of incorporating and re-signifying the other.

From the entrance to the main hall, Arroz com feijão [Rice with Beans], the series that gives the exhibition its title, exalts the pair of grains that form the basis of Brazil’s—and much of Latin America’s—diet. The sculptures are enlarged versions of rice and bean grains, handcrafted in faience, and spread horizontally throughout Vermelho’s main room, breaking with the traditional verticality of monuments to male figures.

The work is grounded in the idea of Radical Tenderness, a concept Argote has been developing throughout his career, which proposes constructing alternative narratives of history, capable of generating ways of living with difference through a shared view of the past.

In this sense, Argote pays homage to the popular wisdom that brought rice and beans together to form a food that not only brings people around the table but also constitutes one of the richest nutritional combinations. The union of the grains, however, carries powerful cultural symbolism.

This now-traditional combination arose from the encounter of different cultural lineages. Beans, cultivated for millennia by Indigenous peoples, were already a staple food from the Caribbean to the southernmost parts of the Americas; rice, meanwhile, was introduced by European colonizers and disseminated through the exploitation of enslaved people of African origin. Its introduction was intended to supply Europe’s growing food and trade demands. Gradually, joint consumption spread, adapted to regional particularities, and consolidated itself as a reference in the Latin American diet. Although the dish reflects historical inequalities, it also expresses popular creativity in the face of the persistent structures of exclusion that hinder the expansion and democratization of access to food.

On the second floor of the exhibition, the same pictorial articulation of the façade can be seen in the series of silk paintings Breathings. Here, the phrases combined with vegetation refer to living together, to bodily fluids, and to popular songs. They include phrases such as “What flows inside,” “Walking hand in hand,” and “With beans in the mouth.” All are installed over a mural painting that expands the foliage from the façade, building a horizon of ideas about affection, the dilation of time, and togetherness.

To contemplate this landscape, Argote has installed in the room a set of colorful rocking chairs called Pájaros [Birds]. These rocking chairs celebrate models found in various parts of Brazil and Colombia, but here they are built in pairs or trios. Each chair is placed beside another, turned in opposite directions, like courting benches. The chairs were designed for sharing and for watching time pass—for a shared pause. Although they face opposite directions, they allow one to see their rocking partner, uniting opposite sides in the same rhythm, the same time, together.