Sonia Gomes – Baroque, Even

Sonia Gomes works through duration: her materials are imbued with memories, accents, affections, and wanderings. Her hands perform twists, stitches, overlaps, wrappings, and cuts. In this way, shelters, weavings, and enclosures emerge, attuned to the scale of the body. Through duration, she mobilizes the expanse of a relentlessly beautiful poetics, rejecting static models. Eminently abstract, her creation offers a way to reflect on the duration of time through forms resulting from gestures associated with care (protecting, mending, wrapping, gathering, and covering). Her work invites reflection on the legacy of the Brazilian Baroque, of which the artist recognizes herself as an heir, without overlooking that it is a memory permeated by the pain of this colonial, slaveholding country’s structural violence. She urges us to think of the Baroque as more than an artistic style established in Europe and transplanted—with distortions and contradictions—to other geographies. The Baroque would then be a deviation, a “reaction against the rationalist claim to penetrate, in a uniform and decisive movement, the arcana of the known,” according to the Martinican poet Édouard Glissant, who linked the Baroque to orality. From this perspective, the becoming of the Baroque is not a project that was concluded in Europe but something rehearsed there as an inflammatory reaction against the homogenizing imperatives of knowledge and life. Such a reaction found its most vibrant developments in countries such as Brazil, Paraguay, and Peru, where both the social fabric and the landscape resist rationalist totalitarianisms and the narcissistic Eurocentric program. This is an unfinished—perhaps unfinishable—story, and Sonia Gomes is one of its protagonists, reclaiming beauty as a means to haunt the world and dismantle its authoritarian myths of purity, unity, and progress. Sonia Gomes – Barroco, mesmo [Baroque, Even] is an exhibition designed as an arc in motion. At Instituto Tomie Ohtake, conversations and research that began in Ouro Preto and Salvador converge in a space of overlapping layers and traversing gazes. Fine linen meshes form curves that simultaneously veil and reveal moments of the artist—from the accumulation of fragments in her studio to the invention of open cages filled with stones lovingly protected by fabrics and stitches. The transparencies and openings created by the artist generate leaps in the curved linearity of the room, while the walls’ redness interacts with the lighting to emphasize nuances of the works’ color and form in their relation with the space. Baroque, indeed, manifests as a dilated and hybrid temporality. As the echo of a cry for freedom incorporated into an aesthetic of abundance, expansion, incompleteness, and movement. As an immersive scene in which the raw merges with the cooked, gold with wood, seclusion with rebellion. Sonia Gomes is emphatic in stating that it was the labor of her own hands—connected with craft and devoted to materials imbued with memories—that allowed her to reclaim knowledge rooted in her body and ancestry. In this way, she forged a way to rework her relationship with the painful memory of Brazil’s history and the grand artistic expression that emerged at the heart of its contradictions and violences. Paulo Miyada Curator

Fabrics, beads, buttons, threads, cords, and knitted pieces are joined by necklaces, bags, clothing, and objects in a collection of traces that reveal the multiple ties between Sonia Gomes’s life and artistic practice. These are enduring connections, wandering through space and time, defying classifications. This room evokes not only the artist’s studio but also her home and body, holding vestiges of processes and origins, as well as intentions and desires. In its nuanced preciousness, it is a kind of reliquary.

Over the past two decades, Sonia Gomes (Caetanópolis, Minas Gerais, 1948) has assumed a prominent role in the Brazilian and international art scenes, earning recognition for the originality of a body of work that defies conventions and artistic genres. Especially drawn to the manual arrangement of everyday materials—fabrics, threads, lace, ropes, found objects—she has developed a contemporary language rooted in artisanal practices and committed to experimentation. Sonia Gomes, in particular, has become a reference for an entire generation of artists who follow her ability to forge paths for art and life without submitting to ready-made models, combining the desire to connect with her ancestry and a refusal to conform to stereotypes about her origins. Woman, Black, artist, Sonia Gomes enters the house of Tomie Ohtake—woman, immigrant, artist—bringing the outcome of a research process that involved multiple institutions. The project Barroco, mesmo [Baroque, Even] sought to connect Sonia Gomes with Baroque’s legacy in Brazil through a journey. In the first half of 2025, exhibitions of Sonia Gomes’s work were held at the Museu da Inconfidência (MIN) in Ouro Preto (MG) and the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Bahia (MAC_BAHIA) in Salvador (BA), creating opportunities for local audiences to engage with her work and creative process, while she visited a wide range of sites and forged stimulating dialogues with researchers, artists, and community members. This dialogic approach aligns with the priorities of Instituto Tomie Ohtake, which sees itself as a cultural organism operating in a network across multiple coordinates of the country, cultivating relationships. At this moment, the dialogue—initiated two years ago between the artist and curator Paulo Miyada, aiming to rethink our critical engagement with the Baroque through her work’s poetic lens—takes spatial form in a highly experimental exhibition. Presenting, for the first time, objects and materials gathered in Sonia Gomes’s studio, the show weaves together works created across different periods in a design that eschews linearity, employing cut curtains, shadow projections, and spiral pathways to create an immersive environment. This environment itself becomes an extension of her work’s affinities with the Baroque repertoire: curves, expansions, movement, repetition, incompleteness, hybridity, layering, durations, and sinuosity. This stage of the project was carried out in collaboration with the artist and her studio team, as well as with the logistical support from the Mendes Wood DM gallery and loans from collectors and institutions. We thank the Ministry of Culture and the Government of the State of São Paulo, through the Secretariat for Culture, Economy, and Creative Industries, for enabling the exhibition 'Sonia Gomes – Barroco, mesmo' [Baroque, Even], in partnership with MIN and MAC_BAHIA. We also extend our gratitude to Bradesco, the Presenting Sponsor, and Motiva, through the Instituto Motiva, the Platinum Sponsor, whose support was made possible via the Culture Incentive Law (Rouanet Law).

Museu da Inconfidência (MIN), in Ouro Preto (MG), a museum managed by Instituto Brasileiro de Museus, is dedicated to reflecting on and communicating the fundamental contribution of what came to be known as Minas Gerais to this long and arduous march toward freedom, woven by many peoples and numerous contradictions. From this standpoint, we can say that freedom here manifests in two ways: political and artistic. Politically, it refers to the anti-colonial movement whose most significant developments took place precisely in Vila Rica, now Ouro Preto. Artistically, it carries an indelible mark of European influences, yet took on such specific features that Mário de Andrade and Germain Bazin, for instance, did not hesitate to call this phenomenon not only singular but original. Baroque and the independence movement, art and politics, are thus deeply intertwined. A most delicate fabric, national politics has been profoundly Baroque ever since; and Baroque, in turn, has always been profoundly political. Sylvio de Vasconcellos said that Baroque exerted such an influence on the soul of Minas Gerais that everything emerging in this vast territory seems to stem from it. But take note: this origin must not be understood as mechanical continuity or sterile repetition, but rather – perhaps – as the idea that Baroque is a fertile terrain that never ceases to yield new creations. Winding through thickets and crags, to borrow a distinctly Parnassian image from Alvarenga Peixoto’s famous poem dedicated to Bárbara Heliodora, it has inspired the most varied forms of artistic expression, both past and present. Sonia Gomes – Barroco, mesmo [Baroque, Even], curated by Paulo Miyada, is inscribed in this expanded conceptual universe, which understands Baroque beyond its strict, textbook definition and glimpses, within the long and complex weave of history, its twists, bindings, seams, braids, and embroideries. In partnership with MIN, Instituto Tomie Ohtake materializes, through Sonia Gomes’s exhibition, the grandeur and reach of Baroque across time and contemporary art. Rather than rehashing clichés, it turns toward a past that remains ever-present in order to generously lay bare its pains, amplify its forces, and reframe our relationship with history and art – embracing Baroque, even. Museu da Inconfidência

Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Bahia (MAC_BAHIA) has opened its doors, in April 2025, to welcome 'Barroco, mesmo [Baroque, Even]', the first solo exhibition of the Minas Gerais-born artist Sonia Gomes in Bahia. The show was presented simultaneously, both at MAC_BAHIA, in Salvador, and at Museu da Inconfidência in Ouro Preto. Bringing these two cities together through the interwoven fabrics and memories of Sonia Gomes’s sculptures is the exhibition’s inaugural poetic gesture – and also the artist’s own desire. Salvador and Ouro Preto, where Baroque is present not only in architectural visuality but also in the way their inhabitants live, serve as points of departure precisely because they were once points of arrival. In the show, this colonial heritage was reimagined through the skilled handiwork of the artist, who assembles collages of different eras into a single object-time. Sonia Gomes is one of Brazil’s most prominent contemporary artists, having stood out in the 60th Venice Biennale, in 2024, as well as in the 35th São Paulo Biennial, in 2023. She has held solo exhibitions at major Brazilian museums such as Pinacoteca de São Paulo, Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, and Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói, in addition to participating in numerous national and international group exhibitions, including the Liverpool Biennial, the Gwangju Biennale, and, more recently, Dona Fulô e outras joias negras [Dona Fulô And Other Black Jewels], which was on view at MAC_BAHIA. Barroco, mesmo [Baroque, Even] was the second solo exhibition presented in the Anexo Gallery since the inauguration of MAC_BAHIA in 2023, continuing a program that celebrates the solid trajectories of leading Afro-Brazilian artists. The Bahia-born artist Ayrson Heráclito opened this program, followed by Sonia Gomes, who, at the height of her 77 years, has become a beacon for understanding Afrodiasporic artistic production worldwide – so deeply resonant in this local context. The exhibition was organized by Instituto Tomie Ohtake in São Paulo, where the works now return, after absorbing the energy of the artist’s homeland, Minas Gerais, and the axé of Bahia – a place she also comes from, and that is also her home. All of it bound together by the power of the memory that her works carry and convey. Welcome, Sonia – we are all grateful. Daniel Rangel Director of MAC_BAHIA

Sonia Gomes works through duration: her materials are imbued with memories, accents, affections, and wanderings. Her hands perform twists, stitches, overlaps, wrappings, and cuts. In this way, shelters, weavings, and enclosures emerge, attuned to the scale of the body. Through duration, she mobilizes the expanse of a relentlessly beautiful poetics, rejecting static models. Born in 1948 in Caetanópolis, Minas Gerais, Sonia Gomes charted a path full of sinuous volutes until the art she had always made was finally recognized as such. At one point, she carried in her wallet, simultaneously, her bar association and artisans’ guild cards, while producing necklaces, bags, clothing, and nameless objects—things that fit neither the realm of craft nor what was then recognized as contemporary art. Growing up as the only Black child in a white household, Gomes knew the challenge of esteem when one does not align with hegemonic models and chose to persist in crafting tangles, wrappings, shelters, and stitches around partially undone weavings and objects. Around two decades ago, when Sonia finally found openings to bring her work into the sphere of contemporary art, its impact was incisive, consolidating the recognition of her families of twists, pendants, and cloths—typologies of works most recurrent in her practice. Eminently abstract, her creation offers a way to reflect on the duration of time through forms resulting from gestures associated with care (protecting, mending, wrapping, gathering, and covering). In doing so, her work builds a bridge for reflecting on the legacy of the Brazilian Baroque, of which the artist recognizes herself as an heir, without overlooking that it is a memory permeated by the pain of this colonial, slaveholding country’s structural violence. Sonia Gomes urges us to think of Baroque as more than an artistic style established in Europe and transplanted—with distortions and contradictions—to other geographies. To consider the Baroque alongside her work is to regard it as a deviation, a “reaction against the rationalist claim to penetrate, in a uniform and decisive movement, the arcana of the known,” according to the Martinican poet Édouard Glissant, who linked the Baroque to orality. Glissant said that “Baroque art employs circling, proliferation, spatial redundancy—elements that mock the supposed unity of the known and the knower—by exalting the endless repetition of quantity, the totality forever begun anew.” From this perspective, the becoming of the Baroque is not a project that was concluded in Europe but something rehearsed there as an inflammatory reaction against the homogenizing imperatives of knowledge and life. Such a reaction found its most vibrant developments in places such as Ouro Preto and Salvador (Brazil), Asunción (Paraguay), and Quito (Peru), where both the social fabric and the landscape resist rationalist totalitarianisms and the narcissistic Eurocentric program. The circulation of Baroque art—in architecture, visual arts, theatre, music, and literature—opened a breach for the insurgent manifestation of messages, languages, and poetics, so that here, more than there, this art became charged with transformative meaning. This is an unfinished—perhaps unfinishable—story, and Sonia Gomes is one of its protagonists, reclaiming beauty as a means to haunt the world and dismantle its authoritarian myths of purity, unity, and progress. Sonia Gomes – Barroco, mesmo [Baroque, Even] is an exhibition designed as an arc in motion. It began with visits to the cities of Ouro Preto and Salvador, where the artist held shows in partnership with Museu da Inconfidência (MIN) and Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Bahia (MAC_BAHIA). In these cities, Gomes visited iconic sites of Baroque art and architecture, speaking with people who carry the threads of Black populations’ histories of resistance and vitality—those who endured the diaspora and slavery without relinquishing their pursuit of freedom. Meanwhile, she shared with local audiences some groupings of her works, displayed for the first time alongside pieces from her collection of objects and materials preserved in her archive as a repository of memories. Now, at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake’s São Paulo headquarters, the intricate web of conversations between curators and the artist—together with contributions from the meetings in Ouro Preto and Salvador with Leda Maria Martins, Du Evangelista, Goya Lopes, Alejandra Muñoz, and Wlamyra Albuquerque—culminates in an exhibition that revisits her production as a spiral of multiple overlapping layers. Fine linen meshes form curves that simultaneously veil and reveal moments of the artist—from the accumulation of fragments in her studio to the invention of open cages filled with stones lovingly protected by fabrics and stitches. The transparencies and openings created by Sonia Gomes generate leaps in the curved linearity of the room, while the walls’ redness interacts with the lighting to emphasize subtle nuances of the works’ color and form in their relation with the space. Baroque, indeed, manifests as a dilated and hybrid temporality. As the echo of a cry for freedom incorporated into an aesthetic of abundance, expansion, incompleteness, and movement. As an immersive scene in which the raw merges with the cooked, gold with wood, seclusion with rebellion. Sonia Gomes did not enter this territory through direct citations of Baroque art history. On the contrary, she is emphatic in stating that it was the labor of her own hands—connected with craft and devoted to materials imbued with memories—that allowed her to reclaim knowledge rooted in her body and ancestry. In this way, she encountered the cosmogonies of spiraling time, over which she later had the chance to speak with Leda Maria Martins, and thus she forged a way to rework her relationship with the painful memory of Brazil’s history and the grand artistic expression that emerged at the heart of its contradictions and violences. Paulo Miyada Curator

This patchwork poetic inhabits an aesthetic of movements, a unique, innovative, inventive idiom, a semiotic elaboration in which the signs, whether iconic, indicial, or symbolic, propose enunciative parataxes and syntaxes, always in a process of formulation of provisional (yet original) meanings, reminding us of the baroque aesthetic in which movement is the epistemic key for kinesis of the gaze based on the details’ abundance and exuberance, preventing a paralysis of sight and thus of the senses, requiring for its cognitive perception a constant shift of the gaze, impregnated by the enigmas of illusory similarity, expanding the veins of possibility for activating sensitivities and perception. Playful movingness, fabricating thoughtful images. In its iconic visual quality, it provokes and incites the gaze, yet convokes and points to its tactile qualities and expands itself as a mental image, interweaving the image’s fleeting appearance with the relations it invokes in the recipient. And thus, as in Sonia’s arts, it echoes within the body’s interlocutions with its surroundings and with the reciprocities of others that also compose it. Martins, Leda Maria. 2024. “Sculptures Dancing Ballet in the Air.” In Sonia Gomes: I Haunt the World with Beauty, edited by Paulo Miyada, 254. Rio de Janeiro: Cobogó.

Baroque, even! In Salvador’s humid April heat, everything seems bound to melt and intertwine its form into an involuntary baroqueness. Sonia Gomes’s art could not be more timely for rethinking the origins and destinies of Bahian culture, probing the desires and traumas of Brazilian reality, or even discerning a grammar of the expectations and frustrations of contemporary life. I will not discuss Baroque’s historiography as an artistic moment or debate the formal and technical specificities of the Brazilian Baroque. Nor would I dare to venture into issues of cultural anthropology related to Brazilianness or inherent to Afro-diasporic themes—whose relevance I fully acknowledge, though I lack the depth of consistent repertoire to offer an effective contribution to that debate. However, within the field of visual arts and architecture, where my attention is more focused, there are at least two lines of reflection I would like to propose, motivated both by the exhibition’s title and by Sonia Gomes’s work. The first line of inquiry that seems relevant to me is to recall the complex relationship between two concepts that are central to Brazilian art and creation in general: the Baroque and anthropophagy. I believe these are two key frameworks for broadly discussing the notion of cultural identity, the ways in which different cultures interact and influence one another, and how this resonates in the poetics of Sonia Gomes. The concept of anthropophagy, popularized by Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto Antropófago (1928), proposes the idea of “devouring” foreign cultures—not to imitate them, but to transform them into something new and original. In this sense, artists such as Aleijadinho, in Minas Gerais, or José Joaquim da Rocha, in Bahia, might be seen as pioneers of this cultural anthropophagy, appropriating European references that, once reworked through a local lens, resulted in the artistic expression of a distinctly singular Baroque. Drawing on studies by contemporary historians such as Rodrigo Gutiérrez Viñuales and my colleague Rodrigo Baeta, various works of Latin American Baroque—with their blend of European, Indigenous, and African elements—can be understood as forms of cultural anthropophagy in which external influences were absorbed and transformed into unique artistic manifestations. In some contexts, the Latin American Baroque may even be interpreted as a strategy of cultural resistance and regional identity affirmation, through which local artists expressed their own values, circumstances, and perspectives while challenging European cultural hegemony. Sonia Gomes appropriates preexisting materials of diverse origins—especially textiles—which she “devours” in her studio through acts of sewing, crumpling, embroidering, unraveling, wrapping, tying, twisting, and stretching. In her work, imprecise times, worn fabrics, and imperfect weaves converge. The equation between gesture, matter, and formal outcome symbolically conveys the complexities and contradictions of Brazilianness. Her pieces embody accumulations of memory—many of them silenced—in twisted fabrics and latent, unexpected forms emerging through interlaced threads. Despite the intricate process behind each piece, combining different techniques of addition, subtraction, and assemblage, what I wish to emphasize is the metaphorical power of stitching and hemming, where the needle serves as the central tool of artistic construction. The needle’s protagonism—enabling the connection between different parts, binding fabrics and ideas—symbolizes the capacity to sew together experiences and memories. Its precision in the sequence of irregular stitches conveys attention to the small things in life, to the microscale of everyday existence—that which often goes unseen within the broader context of contemplative forms and appearances of the resulting bodies. Yet the needle also embodies a symbolic ambiguity that is relevant to the constitution of Brazilian culture: the same instrument capable of piercing fabric in order to wound it can also serve to heal or mend pain through another seam. This ambivalence permeates Sonia Gomes’s work, evoking the ignored and silenced wounds of her own experience as a sign of the broader historical process that shaped Brazilian identity—and of the possible reparations that, though marked by scars, continuously strive to build new bodies, new layers of meaning, and new material realities. In the exhibition, one piece composed of layered and stitched fabrics immediately reminded me, both formally and symbolically, of the fragments of our Church of São Francisco’s ceiling—a tragedy that, even after the wound was repaired in its beautiful gilded vault, will never allow the ceiling to be fully restored. Perhaps it stands as a cruel reminder of the transience of all things, of the impermanence of absolute values in uncertain times. In the exuberance of twists and sewn enclosures suspended in space before this wall piece, I could also sense affinities with the sensory repertoire of a walk through the Feira de São Joaquim—not in the literal sense of formal analogies but in the organic universe of textures, colors, fabrics, and sensualities. The entire exhibition embraces many elements that have been “devoured,” becoming new, unrepeatable objects—dense as the Baroque carvings of Minas Gerais and Bahia, and filled with unknown meanings. Baroque is a multifaceted phenomenon encompassing not only an artistic style but also a worldview—one that reflects the tensions and contradictions of human experience. It is along these lines that I propose another reflection on Sonia Gomes’s work and processes, engaging in brief dialogues with the research and production of contemporary artists from Bahia, and highlighting a repertoire of ethical and aesthetic values within current Brazilian art in different dimensions of the Baroque. In the Bahian context, perhaps one of the most compelling dialogues in Sonia Gomes’s work is with the itinerant assemblages of the late Jayme Fygura. Although working with different materials and through a performative urban dimension, Fygura embodied a living redemption of that popular Baroque described by the critic and philosopher Eugenio d’Ors. As in some of Gomes’s pieces—where the boundaries between garment and sculpture blur—Fygura used discarded materials, often metallic, to create armors imbued with imprints and memories, with which he roamed the city streets. Beyond the possible parallels between artistic techniques, both Fygura and Gomes, as Black artists, assert the right to a voice that has been historically silenced. This ethical and historical commitment is also present in the prints by Goya Lopes, a pioneering Bahian textile designer who rescues and reimagines African forms, colors, and motifs. Through different processes, Lopes and Gomes create new surfaces full of ancestral memories, in which drawing prevails—whether printed or stitched, continuous or fragmented. During the Brazilian colonial period, the imposition of European cultural norms often silenced both African and Indigenous practices and expressions, leading to the loss of traditions and to the forced assimilation of various ethnic groups. In Bahia, in recent decades, there has been at least a partial reversal of the systematic erasure of the histories and identities of enslaved peoples, as well as of the cultural silencing that once minimized or distorted the richness of African and Indigenous traditions and the diversity of their lived experiences. The silent eloquence of Nádia Taquary’s pieces evokes this deliberate ostracism. Inspired by the jewelry of enslaved women, religious symbols, and Afro-Brazilian cultural elements, Taquary’s works are composed of accumulations of finely crafted natural materials, polished and assembled into elegant compositions—often on a spatial scale that no human body could possibly bear. Many of these works seem to me comparable, both formally and symbolically, to some of Sonia Gomes’s necklaces and suspended pieces. In another sense of historical erasure, both the invisibility of Salvador’s popular neighborhoods and the city’s image as a construction of hegemonic narratives permeate the paradoxical estrangement of Paulo Coqueiro’s iconographies. His photographs, printed on steel sheets sourced from scrap yards, function as fictional images that are perhaps more real than any traditional postcard of the city. In terms of cumulative process, Coqueiro’s dense, memory-laden images resonate with the thickness of Sonia Gomes’s textile layers, capable of generating new narratives and multiple possibilities for materials that might otherwise seem exhausted. In a more formal relationship than the twists and interlacings of Sonia Gomes’s fabrics, the dreamlike crochet installations of Dôra Araújo also offer compelling points of convergence—especially through the material affinities of fibers and the ancestral tradition of feminine crafts associated with textiles and sewing. Finally, I cannot fail to mention the idea of horror vacui—the fear of emptiness—another concept that can be linked to Sonia Gomes’s work and that finds two Bahian counterparts for dialogue: on one side, Bela Seifarth, with the pictorial density of her human landscapes inspired by street markets and Recôncavo festivities; and on the other, Juarez Paraíso, with the surreal exuberance of his spaces and murals—some, unfortunately, now lost. The polymath and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz believed that beauty was bound to diversity and multiplicity, understanding the Baroque as a style that reflected the complexity and richness of human experience. Baroque art and architecture, with their exuberant and dynamic forms, could be seen as expressions of the harmony and the order underlying life’s apparent chaos. The works and processes of Sonia Gomes seem to echo that vision. Baroque, even! References Andrade, Oswald de. “Manifesto antropófago” (1928). In Vanguarda europeia e modernismo brasileiro: apresentação e crítica dos principais manifestos vanguardistas, edited by Gilberto Mendonça Teles, 319–325. Vozes, 1975. Baeta, Rodrigo Espinha. O barroco, a arquitetura e a cidade nos séculos XVII e XVIII. EDUFBA, 2012. D’Ors, Eugenio. Lo barroco. Tecnos, 1993. Viñuales, Rodrigo Gutiérrez. “Pervivencias barrocas en el arte contemporáneo latinoamericano.” In Arte barroco: una revisión desde las periferias, edited by Carlos Javier Castro Brunetto, 97–120. Fundación Mapfre Guanarteme, 2004. ABOUT Alejandra Hernández Muñoz Uruguayan, based in Salvador since 1992, she is an architect with a master’s degree in Urban Design and a PhD in Urbanism from the Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA), as well as a postdoctoral degree in Arts from the Universidade de Brasília (UnB). She is a professor of Art and Design History at the Escola de Belas Artes (EBA/UFBA), a collaborator with the Postgraduate Program in Architecture and Urbanism (PPGAU/UFBA), and a curator and critic of art, design, and architecture.

As soon as I received the invitation from Instituto Tomie Ohtake to take part in one of the opening events of Sonia Gomes’s exhibition Barroco, mesmo [Baroque, Even] at Museu da Inconfidência in Ouro Preto, I was thrilled by the prospect of exploring the connections between the artist’s work and the myriad of ideas surrounding the Baroque that I have learned and revisited throughout my academic path in the field of art history. I did not realize, however, how much the act of seeking the Baroque in Gomes’s work would lead me into the risks of a teleological approach. After all, what is defined in advance is, from the start, also limited. Knowing more about the Baroque—whether the seventeenth-century European or the later Brazilian-colonial one—than about the artist herself, and recognizing this imbalance, my approach to this text ended up, in a way, running counter to what I believe in and advocate: first and foremost, to look at the work, to allow the “ethics of the work” to impose itself, and thus to determine the direction of the analysis. Thus, while delving into the works, I also watched and listened to Sonia Gomes in numerous documentaries and interviews. I held on to the artist’s images in her daily practice—the focus on her hands, determined to rummage through drawers and fabrics, and her gentle yet confident voice, belonging to someone who knows herself and recognizes the long paths she has traveled. The solidity and coherence of Gomes’s trajectory are evident in her work, leaving no doubt as to the grandeur of her contribution to Brazilian contemporary art. I then went on to read what had already been written on the subject and realized that much of what I intended to say had already been said—certainly with greater precision, quality, and beauty. What remained for me, I thought, was to return to the Baroque—that centuries-old labyrinth of concepts—and from there perhaps find a way to present Gomes’s work again. I thought of doing so by stitching together fragments of these absorbed concepts—echoes—with the cutouts of observed images, trying not to lose myself in theoretical or historiographical matters but rather to evoke them as they came to me: with words meant to suggest images that, in turn, speak their own words—convinced that “the nature of things is inscribed in the words that name them.” In several interviews available on digital platforms, the artist herself mentions this Baroque quality that had long been noticed—both by others and by herself—in her work, back when her production was barely recognized as art. She recounts, first, the figure of an antiques dealer from Belo Horizonte, a specialist in the Baroque of Minas Gerais, who welcomed her work and identified the style in it—a meeting of ideas that Sonia seems to have soon rediscovered and embraced. At that moment, she saw herself as a bearer of the Brazilian Baroque heritage. Today, years later and internationally acclaimed, she reaffirms: Baroque, even. So then. When reviewing the historiography of the term and style, from its genesis as Garcia da Orta’s “imperfect pearl,” through the pejorative connotations of excess and bizarreness, to contemporary debates—many of which expose the anachronism of a label that historiography applied to the arts of colonial Brazil—it becomes clear that the multiple definitions of Baroque, often conflicting and contradictory, demand a position to be taken: what exactly are we talking about when we speak of “Baroque”? Baroque can be discussed as a style from a historiographical standpoint, especially recalling its belated emergence between the 19th and 20th centuries, when it was perceived and articulated by Heinrich Wölfflin based on formal analyses. There, the prevalence of formal suggestions signaled the recognition of a style markedly opposed to the Classical. Yet this style flourished—in a precise moment and, initially, within a loosely defined geographical space—simultaneously with political, economic, and cultural processes of immense significance that helped shape the first modernity: the Catholic Counter-Reformation, the consolidation of absolutist political regimes, the rise of capitalism, the expansion of colonization, and the scientific revolution. Thus, “Baroque” would correspond—in a presumed “spiritual and intellectual unity”—to the spirit of a world in transformation, marked by movement, global displacements, exchanges, fusions, appropriations, and cultural hybridizations. Here, the word becomes an adjective indicating the essence of societies, cultures, and mentalities… In Brazil, the art produced during the colonial period, especially in the 18th century, added a patriotic adjective to “Baroque” as a noun, so that “Brazilian Baroque” came to be named particularly through the influence of a historiography eager to establish a founding national style: a kind of conceptual graft that was widely accepted, given that, in formal terms, Brazilian colonial art bears characteristics quite distinct from that produced in Europe across its various media. Similarly, the material conditions and modes of learning the crafts specific to the colony, combined with the abundant contribution of Indigenous and African labor, resulted in an original output, full of complexity and often far removed from what in the Old Continent was labeled Baroque. This could be considered “the first manifestation of art, in the modern world, to bear a note of extra-European universality.” What later came to be identified as the “Baroque of Minas Gerais” also participated in a political project propelled by modernist figures in search of an authentic national art. However, returning to Sonia Gomes, the Baroque that the artist reveals in her work seems, in my view, to stem from a perception—well-grounded and easily intuited—of stylistic features that can be linked to the entirety of Baroque poetics: Baroque, the noun. This leads us to consider her work as a return of the Baroque as a universal category, in its cyclical, ahistorical aspect: a “constant Baroque,” as proposed by Eugenio d’Ors. Within this constant, what always returns is dynamism, asymmetry, hybridity, exuberance, the continuous tense, eloquence, theatricality… Even at a first glance at the artist’s production—an overview guided by the most immediate and sensitive aspects of the works—a macro vision emerges: a world of curves and countercurves, of volutes, ovals, and parabolas, or of hyperbolic lines from which rings that close in on themselves abruptly spring. “The well-encrusted vowels” of the word Baroque. Or could they be cells, seeds, clots, nodules, tangles expelling viscera, shaping loops, eyes, ears, and tails? Pulsing coils, in sudden excrescences. Hybrid creatures, perhaps like the “chimeras” of which Borromini was accused. Always an organic flow. “Forms preserve lives,” says Sonia. Yet, while this immediate relationship revealing the aforementioned cyclical constancy manifests itself, the artist’s work also recalls the “Baroque spirit” experienced in colonial times, which still hovers over the so-called “historic” cities of Minas Gerais: in the beira-seveira rooftops and the windows with canga de boi arches, in the persistent tolling of the bells, in unwavering religiosity, and in the solemn rites of the mestiço brotherhoods. Divino and Rosário festivals, processions of the Dead Lord, multicolored pennants and ribbons on poles, reliquaries, silver-embroidered lanterns, services and masses played by heart (in its double meaning) on out-of-tune violins. A miniature oratory, crepe-paper flowers, glimmers of beads, mother-of-pearl, embroidery, and buttons. Vanitas vanitatum. In this sense, the relationship with the Baroque is forged through a broad, cultural reading, a highly complex appropriation of the past. A commanding mastery of local color. Persistences which are more or less worn, frayed. Next, a close look. Basting stitches. Stitch by stitch, sinuous paths of parallel sutures, ridged seams, warp and weft. Each bead of shimmering color, sequins, spangles. A scrap of chita fabric patterned with sky and sunflowers; the starry weave of guipure lace. Entanglements, interlining, skeins, nests, cocoons. Sequences of fabric yo-yos, evocations of amulets. And dolls, like children—or tiny saintly figures—emerging from the guts of bundle-bellies. Suggestions of feminine worlds, of their labors, their urgencies, their tidings. Curtains drawn slightly ajar. Retrospective glances in fleeting mirrors. Excerpts of memories that, though not our own—but that we sense and accept—awaken our own. Baroque, indeed, but much more. Gomes’s work is the poetic gesture that evokes poetry in us, that makes memories and words rush forth—an excess of adjectives, to the horror of many. Astonishing (and precious) beauty. The encrusted vowels of the word Baroque. REFERENCES Andrade, Mário de. “Aleijadinho.” In Aspectos das artes plásticas no Brasil. São Paulo; Brasília: Livraria Martins Editora, 1975. Averini, Riccardo. “Tropicalidade do barroco.” In Affonso Ávila, Barroco: teoria e análise. Belo Horizonte: Companhia Brasileira de Metalurgia e Mineração, 1997. Baxandall, Michael. Padrões de intenção: a explicação histórica dos quadros. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2006. Bispo, Alexandre Araújo. “A tecelagem da memória na obra de Sonia Gomes.” O Menelick 2º Ato, 2015. https://www.omenelick2ato.com/artes-plasticas/213 (accessed October 2, 2025). Chantelou, Paul Fréart de. Diary of the Cavaliere Bernini’s Visit to France. Translated by Margery Corbett, edited by Anthony Blunt. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. Coli, Jorge. “Depoimento.” in Álvaro Kassab, O olhar de Coli sobre a história da arte, no. 345. Jornal da Unicamp, November 27–December 3, 2006. D’Ors, Eugenio. Du Baroque. Paris: Gallimard, 1968. Fonseca, Raphael. “Meu mundo é hoje,” Raphael Fonseca (blog), August 7, 2018. https://raphaelfonseca.net/Meu-mundo-e-hoje (accessed October 2, 2025). Gomes, Sonia, and Paulo Miyada, eds. Assombrar o mundo com beleza. Rio de Janeiro: Cobogó, 2024. ———. “Torce o tempo o afeto do tato: uma aliteração para Sonia Gomes.” In Assombrar o mundo com beleza, eds. Sonia Gomes and Paulo Miyada, 235–248. Rio de Janeiro: Cobogó, 2024. Hansen, João Adolfo. “Barroco, neobarroco e outras ruínas.” Teresa: Revista de Literatura Brasileira, no. 2 (2001): 10–67. Orta, Garcia da. [Goa, 1563.] Quoted in Victor Tapié, O barroco. São Paulo: Cultrix; Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 1983. Sarduy, Severo. Barroco. Lisboa: Vega, 1989. Villari, Rosario. L’uomo barocco. Roma–Bari: Laterza, 1991. Wölfflin, Heinrich. Conceitos fundamentais da história da arte. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1989 [1915]. ———. Renascença e barroco. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2010 [1888]. ABOUT Letícia Andrade Holds a degree in Art Education and a bachelor’s in Visual Arts from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp), as well as a master’s in Art and Cultural History and a PhD in History from the same institution. She completed a research stay at the Università degli Studi di Pisa and conducted postdoctoral research at the Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade de São Paulo (FAU-USP) and at Unicamp. She is currently an associate professor at Universidade Federal de São João del-Rei (UFSJ), where she coordinated the Centro de Estudos e Pesquisa em História da Arte e Patrimônio (CEPHAP) from 2018 to 2023.

Threads of saintly hair, biblical scenes covering gilded ceilings, penances, pieces of sanctified bones, domestic shrines, scapulars, ex-votos, images of angels—beings that possess only virtue, never blood nor flaws. Extravagant objects and images are part of the Baroque imagination, which stubbornly resists the passage of time. Consuming and inventing memories, this Brazilian Baroque was, at its inception, woven and threaded with sugarcane, violence, and piety. Today, the Baroque reveals its viscera through the hands and sensibilities of Sonia Gomes. It is said that the Baroque has vigorous, simple exterior forms meant to reveal interiors that are overloaded, surprising, gilded, and filled with altars. It is said that the Baroque is an irregular stone, demanding that jewelers correct its supposed imperfections. At jewelry stores, Baroque stones were expected to be sanded, measured, and adjusted to disguise their uncertain origins. At least, that was what was expected of artists handling the colonial world’s tropical portions in their hands—the Portuguese Americas. But what happens when an artist, claiming to be as Black as she is marginalized, displays basting stitches, collects twisted scraps, and exhibits inflated objects, suspended like viscera at a marketplace? In the exhibition Barroco, mesmo [Baroque, Even], I saw the Baroque’s viscera twisted and hung by Sonia Gomes. In dictionaries, Baroque is defined as the display of excess: exaggeration arranged to dazzle us along the walls and ceilings with the vibrant colors of colonial churches, where all faith had to be shown, dusted with gold powder. Sonia Gomes masters objects already worn, full of memories, exhausted by the days and nights they have endured. The artist tells us: “The material arrives here asking for help!” These are remnants that want to live in another body. She answers them, presenting us with exaggerated recesses, unapologetic overlaps. In Baroque logic, there is always room for another pain, another flower on the altar, another penance. Meanwhile, Sonia Gomes does not waste affection; she celebrates irregularities, irregular stones. She confronts us with reverse sides, with the art of manipulating pre-used materials, jewels without pre-defined shapes. Baroque has eaves, edges, and fringes. Sonia’s art has folds, twists, and paints that remake what has already served other purposes—what seems exhausted by contemporary life, which easily discards what it uses. Some of the modern Brazilian republic’s persistent missions still reinforce the burial of the Baroque legacy: the buildings, the arts, and the institutions that founded Brazil. As we move among Sonia Gomes’s pieces, we see the Baroque proud of its memories, displaying sewing boxes that hold worn buttons and aged papers on which a new, contemporary text about domestic life, feminine adornments, and the passage of time can be written. The white faces and misshapen bodies of cherubs are gone; what emerges is the work of a Black imagination that operates on and beneath the social fabric, as violent as it is delicate, always patched in this absurdly unequal country. Within the Baroque imagination, the world is a battleground between the forces of good and evil. Good and evil were rivals, never mingling. All poverty was divine, and slavery would save the captive. Pain was a public spectacle of redemption, with saints that bled, exhausted penitents, and Black people who carried—and still carry—the burdens along the winding urban path. The exhibition Baroque, Even suspends above our heads the weight of our collective and personal experiences within our Baroque, patriarchal, and slaveholding constitution. Gomes exposes our maps on the museum walls: maps made of frayed fabric, hung and reassembled amid subtle conflicts, the daily marking of the differences that shape us as individuals and as a nation. I saw maps with indistinct boundaries between then and now. The margins are being redrawn. There is something Baroque in the exploration of perspectives that Gomes proposes. This time, it is not the colonial churches’ architecture deceiving our perception and senses with ethereal paintings; yet we can still see that there is much more space for art within the narrow layout of old cities such as Salvador, Bahia. Immersed in the pieces of Baroque, Even, it is possible to explore the reverse sides of our social fabric in a country still trying to hide its pains, scraps, patches, and uneven cuts beneath gilded surfaces. One must pay attention to the folds and stains of Gomes’s quilts and drawers—the ones from both the cities and the artist—because they are also ours: feminine, Black, and marginal. Gomes’s collection embraces excess yet recognizes the dignity and wounds of all that retains memory, like the colonial cities and contemporary Brazil. The Baroque, once seen as a cultural and artistic flaw to be corrected—and supposedly requiring repairs so that its reverse sides (its scratches and basting stitches) would not be exposed in the social fabric—is remade here. Gomes’s work disallows such corrections; instead, it exposes them with disparate patterns sewn into the same piece, bindings that celebrate seams and asymmetrical overlaps, showing us that it is not worth concealing the ways we are woven into the public spectacles of our shared experiences. REFERENCES Collymore, Nan. “Sonia Gomes: My Work Is Black, Feminine and Marginal.” Contemporary And América Latina. Accessed October 2, 2025. https://amlatina.contemporaryand.com/en/editorial/my-work-is-black-feminine-and-marginal-sonia-gomes/. Stoffa, Felipe. “Sonia Gomes Cria Esculturas a Partir de Tecidos.” Harper’s Bazaar Brasil. Accessed October 2, 2025. https://harpersbazaar.uol.com.br/bazaar-art/sonia-gomes-cria-esculturas-a-partir-de-tecidos/. Instituto Tomie Ohtake and Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Bahia. Sonia Gomes – Barroco, mesmo. Exhibition catalog. Salvador, 2025. Museu de Arte de São Paulo. Sonia Gomes: A vida renasce / Ainda me levanto. Exhibition catalog. São Paulo, 2018. Pinacoteca de São Paulo. Sonia Gomes: Sinfonia das cores. Exhibition catalog. São Paulo, 2023. Projeto Viva. “Mapa Sonia Gomes.” Accessed October 2, 2025. https://www.vivaprojects.org/mapa-soniagomes. ABOUT Wlamyra Albuquerque She holds a master’s degree in History from Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA) and a PhD in Social History from Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp), with a postdoctoral fellowship (Senior Stage) at Harvard University funded by CAPES. She is currently a professor in the Department of History and the Graduate Program in History at UFBA, as well as Superintendent for International Relations at the same institution. Among her main publications are O jogo da dissimulação – abolição e cidadania no Brasil (2009); Uma história da cultura afro-brasileira, coauthored with Walter Fraga (2010, Jabuti Prize); and De que lado você samba – Raça, política e ciência na Bahia do pós-abolição, coauthored with Gabriela Sampaio (2021).