NAZARETH PACHECO: GAMES OF CONTAMINATION
“Nazareth Pacheco: Games of Contamination” brings together works created by the artist since the late 1980s, tracing her output and investigations over four decades, and includes two outdoor pieces created specifically for this exhibition.
Critical discourse on the artist’s work frequently highlights the early influence of Post-Minimalism, the use of serialization as an operational method, and an interest in material experimentation—specifically engaging with the properties and uses of the materials themselves. Equally notable is the way her work connects to her personal history and to an exploration of the body and the feminine, spanning dimensions that range from the intimate to the political.
Her work is also frequently associated with relationships of contrast and reflection between beauty and violence, seduction and repulsion, pleasure and pain, protection and confinement, control and vulnerability, intimacy and exposure, and fragility and resistance.
For Nazareth Pacheco, these pairings do not operate as opposites. They highlight the simultaneous and inseparable nature of their two poles, revealing the tension and reversals that keep the match in motion and the body-player in the game. As in the game of Ping-Pong, attention is captured by the dynamic of hitting and returning—a dynamic established here between artist, material, subject, space, and audience. As they interact they place their bets, set their rules, and, from time to time, transgress them.
In this sense, the game functions for the artist as a critical procedure: an operation capable of transforming culturally stabilized signs into ambiguous, unsettling experiences, revealing the subtle forms of violence inscribed within the mechanisms that normalize and capture the body and desire.
What becomes clear, once the match is underway, is that a body becoming female may well be the riskiest move—the ultimate wager. In a territory defined by intimacy, this body—fragmented and perpetually in the making—is constantly traversed by mechanisms of normalization, capture, and resistance. Meanwhile, surrounding the impenetrable Bedroom, what once seemed confined to the private sphere reminds us that power games spill over and proliferate within the social and collective realm.
These tensions are also visible in the materials the artist employs and the way she subverts their customary uses: ranging from rubber, bronze and brass to wax, acrylic, beads, needles, blades, and other sharp, surgical objects—and even blood itself. Their seductive, gleaming surfaces mirror back to the viewer an inverted, unstable image of themselves and their surroundings. Materials, bodies, senses, and positions undergo mutual transformation throughout the match. Amidst partners and adversaries, attraction and confrontation, every moment of engagement reveals that the experience of the work is, at the same time, an experience of contamination.
Amanda Tavares, Curator
WARNING
The exhibition features works made with sharp and/or pointed objects.
After the match begins, remain extra attentive as you move through the space and do not touch the artworks—both to preserve the pieces and, above all, to ensure your safety.
Delicate, reflective, and seemingly fragile materials conceal sharp points, edges, and hazards. In this exhibition, allure and danger often go hand in hand. It is part of the game.
You may sit only on the two wooden benches—the works titled *Coluna Vertebral* (Spine). Do not move or reposition them.
Sitting on the bronze bench or the acrylic chair is not permitted.