Upon entering the first room of the exhibition One Does Not Touch the Intimacy of Things Without Some Risk, the viewer is enveloped by a kind of daylight séance, for here one is surrounded and immersed by six works by Marina Schroeder endowed with a solar clarity. Within them, two pictorial techniques are harmoniously brought together, visibly dissociated yet superimposed: frottage in charcoal, marking in black the white support of the cotton fabric; and painting (astonishingly!) with ‘rose paint,’ a material conceived by the artist, who developed her own pigments extracted from Avalanche roses in chemical laboratories, yielding earthy tones that range from yellow to ochre, passing through brown or brick red to moss green.

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At times, what emerges are elements that evoke, now and then, typical topographies almost like cliffs or traces of possible imaginary choreographies, as in From Memories: Surface, from the series Of What Already Exists (2025); while elsewhere it is the horizon itself that is revealed, as in Compressed Time (2025). Particularly striking is the diptych-like potential of Possible Horizons II & III (2025), for here we find, in synthesis, the juxtaposition of landscapes. By uniting mountains and horizon which would ultimately be, on a beach, akin to looking simultaneously toward the coast and the threshold of the firmament…

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These paintings reveal an aesthetic of emptiness. Although they were meticulously conceived by the artist, and even if they retain a certain degree of chance, these works contain vast unfilled fields. What thus emerges is the notion of an intentionally unfinished impression. Much like life itself, Schroeder subtly teaches and conveys, through her abstractions, her understanding that life or the drive of life is a constant becoming, within which the unfinished and the incomplete remain latent, moving toward an eternal ‘doing and, in doing, making oneself…,’ an existentialist maxim of Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness (1943).

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We then encounter a piece that, though it may initially seem small or somewhat displaced, represents the cornerstone of Schroeder’s entire exhibition. Of German descent, and deeply engaged with the study of her origins, historical hardships, and silenced words, the artist has made, makes, and will always make things bloom as in the song The Impossible Dream (1965), whose Portuguese version was recorded six years later by Maria Bethânia. The photograph in question, titled What Remains, from the series Of What Already Exists (2025), depicts one of several elements belonging to a collection assembled over decades by the artist, composed of fragments of the Berlin Wall, which collapsed in 1989. It is from this fact that the previously mentioned frottages are derived from walls which, once singled out or revealed by the artist, project themselves or dance beyond the fine fabrics of the canvases, becoming lost (or perhaps found) in the infinity of the spaces in which they are shown. In an analogous way, the horizons previously discussed also cease to be walls, transmuting into infinitely distant points of the future, of the boundless, of what lies beyond the sea.

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The artist uses this same stone from Berlin in two works on handmade paper produced from rose waste to imprint its form onto the paper. Here we are presented with the idea that once an arrow has been released, it cannot return. Once a word has been spoken, neither can it. Once the sheet has been marked, marked it remains… Life must therefore hold both right and wrong turns, as well as responsibility for them. This is the crowning of beauty, sustainability, transformation, and cycles and why not say, in times of Lent, an almost religious sense of resurrection and contemplation of the sacred in art.

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In the third part of the exhibition space, the viewer encounters three paintings whose hues reach tones of navy blue, gray, brown, and black, with a more emphatic presence of the spray technique, only subtly present before. In contrast with the first room, here we find twilight, dusk, the nocturnal, and the emphasis falls on two pieces: Marks in Time: Traces, from the series Of What Already Exists (2025), and Marks in Time: Marks (2025). Installed on opposite walls, they suggest both the moonlight of the preceding day and the dawn of a new day yet to come. At the Galleria Borghese in Rome, in a small room on the second floor, there is a ceiling painting dedicated precisely to twilight and dawn figures that evoke, much like the seasons of the year, temporality and the cycles of life. This is what we find in the closing movement of this exhibition.

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In sum, this solo exhibition by Marina Schroeder moves us because it reveals that life, while incomplete and inconstant, is nonetheless capable of inviting each of us, day after day, to fill it in such a way as to find value and congruence in precisely those very qualities. From this perspective, the exhibition is a balm for the visible eyes of the body as well as the invisible eyes of the soul, for it encourages us to intuit the redemptive character of art and to perceive how everyday life can and should be filled with beauty. A kind of beauty that never ceases to surprise us.

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Gus Moura de Almeida is from Rio de Janeiro and lives and works in the city of São Paulo. A lawyer graduated from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, he also trained in Curatorial Studies at Parque Lage School of Visual Arts and in Cultural Management and Marketing at Leuphana University / Goethe-Institut. He has worked in the art system for 17 years, primarily leading commercial galleries.

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march 2026