Poeticas do subterrâneo summons a world from below. A hole, a mouth, a crater, a small cavity open in the earth. Every surface holds a depth, and every hollow opens a question. In her first exhibition in Mexico, Beatrice Arraes (Fortaleza, Brazil, 1998) constructs a miniature territory traversed by subterranean forces: heat, pressure, and chance. The earth appears as living, desiring matter, full of secret entrances and mysterious hollows.
The exhibition brings together fragments of an imagined geography. Eroded surfaces, volcanic bodies, tiny staircases, containers, and small accidents suggest a space in constant transformation. Each piece seems marked by something moving underneath: a force that pushes, opens, sinks, or transforms.
Arraes’s work begins with a direct relationship to matter. During her residency in Guadalajara, the artist experimented with local soils, engobes, and firing processes that alter the color and surface of the pieces. Ceramics introduce a dimension of chance: what enters the kiln never returns the same. Green may darken. Black may reveal unexpected nuances. Earth may harden without losing its vulnerable appearance, as if it still preserved something wet, something soft.
The paintings expand this same poetics. Color appears in layers: something from below insists, seeps through, stains, or resurfaces. Her forms suggest flooded territories, small volcanoes, mineral bodies, and landscapes seen from an unstable scale. Painting does not fix an image; it opens a depth.
The ceramic boards are presented as games without instructions. There are paths, small accumulations, marks, dice, and holes that could indicate possible movements, though no rule is given in advance. As in nature, the point is not to impose a closed narrative, but to observe relationships between surface and depth, between containment and overflow. Dice, artifacts created to produce chance, have existed for millennia and condense a relationship with luck and
with that which cannot be controlled. To throw them is to accept that something may fall, enter, deviate, or disappear into a hole.
The underground is not only what lies beneath the earth. It is also what remains hidden inside things: the interior of a vessel, the depth of a hole, the memory of one layer covered by another, the secret of a closed form. In dialogue with Gaston Bachelard’s material imagination, Arraes does not reveal a definitive content; she holds us between mystery and the desire to know. The hollows are possible entrances to another place: refuges, craters, wounds, burrows. Sometimes they receive. Sometimes they expel. Sometimes they simply hold.
When scale shifts, the volcano becomes sensual: a presence still charged with heat and force. The artist displaces the heroic gaze of geology, and the cone becomes a nearby object, a domestic altar. The monumental becomes intimate. Depth becomes tactile.
Paulina Ascencio Fuentes