JAILDO MARINHO: ME.TA.MOR.PHOS.IS

Upon crossing the threshold of the exhibition, it’s impossible to anticipate the visual dialogue established between the seemingly disconnected artworks and the museum’s historic architecture. Under the title Metamorphism, the Pernambuco State Museum hosts one of the largest exhibitions of artist Jaildo Marinho (Santa Maria da Boa Vista, 1970), a Pernambuco native who has lived in France for the past 32 years. The show presents 25 pieces made from an array of materials such as marble, granite, soap, keratin, wood, leather, and ox horns. Featuring sculptures and an installation, the exhibition offers a synthesis of Marinho’s visual language—a body of work deeply tied to his origins and past, which immerses the viewer in his complex artistic narrative, rich with dreams, memory, history, and childhood.

As a seasoned sculptor, Jaildo Marinho continually explores monumental sculpture and site-specific works, demonstrating a particular sensitivity to architecture. His work emerges from the tension between the artist’s precise gestures and the resistant material—a creation born from both constructive effort and emotion. Metamorphism materializes the longing for his childhood, paying tribute to his family—especially his mother and grandmother—and to the popular culture of his hometown, Santa Maria da Boa Vista. “Returning to Recife for a solo exhibition is very special to me. It’s like closing a chapter while opening new paths. This exhibition is a celebration of my roots and my artistic journey. I left Recife to explore the world when I was 22. Now, I’m back and I want to share my land, the handcrafted work of my origins,” says the artist.

Each of Marinho’s works begins as a space for exploration, a framework for an open-ended construction. These are dialogical objects that intertwine without overshadowing one another, expressing a profound desire for direct confrontation with the viewer, his past, and present. A multiplicity of iconographic sources converge in his work. The artist draws from memories of his childhood and daily life, where reality and fiction freely coexist. Laundered clothing becomes clotheslines strung between granite structures, and massive needles carved from pequizeiro wood—a tree native to the Cariri region on the Ceará-Pernambuco border—flow through space with a tactile, evocative presence. Pequi is a fruit with a distinct flavor, beloved and feared for its interwoven thorns—just like Jaildo’s needles. “I’m captivated by needles; they are the most perfect sculpture, created by humans over 60,000 years ago,” says the artist.

Through Marinho’s unique process of metamorphosis, materials are transformed into open-ended creations—spaces that invite sensory and emotional participation, gradually leading us into the artist’s remembrances. Metamorphism is an event of affect, perception, and reflection—a direct extension of the artist’s vision, reaching a synthesis of his creative experience. This is an intimate exhibition, anchored in time through the forms and meanings recovered by memory and reconstructed by the artist’s hands—a game of tension and release from his memories of the sertão. Marinho revisits his childhood by installing a fence made of marble, wood, and soap—a tribute to his grandmother, who used to make handmade soap from sheep and ox tallow to support the household. Leather and horns evoke livestock, the main source of sustenance and income in the sertão. These are fragments of history reinterpreted through the artist’s gaze, presented as an unreal expedition that invites contemplation.

For Marinho, an artwork is never a finished object. His practice merges form and structure, materiality and lyricism. Geometry serves as a mechanism for pictorial reflection on the color and purity of marble. He seeks for the work to speak for itself—allowing the interplay of form, color, and light to be the only conduit of communication with the viewer. And he succeeds—through a lyricism that defies the hardness and coldness of the material. Committed and disciplined, Marinho is an artist in constant, intense personal pursuit, capable of developing a body of work with distinct procedures and concerns, with marble as his primordial substance. He explores its intimate structure and, like a child, begins to manipulate and deconstruct it—a poetic image that recalls his early years in Santa Maria da Boa Vista, when he crafted objects from wood and plaster even before learning to write.

In Metamorphism, Marinho continues his authentic quest. Contrary to Johann Winckelmann’s belief that the perfection of classical Greek statuary lay in the absence of color, Jaildo Marinho embraces chromatic brilliance. His work proposes a new vision, a fresh approach to color, based on the relationship between color and space. Color manifests as a rich adjective—his vivid reds and yellows lend a personal touch. Though seemingly simple chromatic variations, they are intentional and rhythmically applied across the surfaces or volumes of his pieces, without obscuring the material’s inherent complexity.

If space can restore time, Marinho seals his memories by incorporating ancestral heritage: ceramics referencing the Coripó Indigenous art appear in the exhibition, culminating in an installation made from wooden posts—an exaltation of the uncertain, dry fences of the region—a visual metaphor for the physical and symbolic borders of life in the sertão.

Jaildo Marinho’s intervention in the museum’s spaces builds a bridge between the classical and the contemporary, past and present, creating a unique visual journey. The sheer power of the work—its immediacy and the presence of both the remote and the current—confronts us with a silence before the pieces, making any interpretation feel almost intrusive. Perhaps the respectful silence the works seem to demand is the best way to engage with them—accompanying and internalizing them, as one does with art in its highest form. His “states of relation” draw us inward, making us reflect. They reveal that there is more than the visible and the perishable.

*Cover image: Jaildo Marinho. Untitled, 2025. Granite and acrylic.