The exhibition The Treachery of Images, september 09 - 26, 2026, brings together a selection of recent works that broaden the process-oriented nature of the artist’s ongoing research and investigations. He creates fabulations or historical narratives, transforming his artistic experiences into fertile ground for his political inquiries and existential impulses.
Across the different series, he draws on his versatility to blur boundaries through multiple combinations. He develops a visual practice with a playful and ironic repertoire of images, grounded in seemingly opposing languages. He studied Brazilian flora at the Margaret Mee Foundation at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London, where he acquired a scholarly repertoire through the scientific study of botanical illustration.
His artistic trajectory is marked by experimentation that reveals a political constellation and an articulation between art, science, biomes, and socio-political systems. We find ourselves in a free yet tensely coexisting territory, where certain symbols are brought into play to evoke ideas of identity and belonging—central concerns in his artistic practice.
These are situations and scenarios of playful superimpositions, in which botanical elements are significant protagonists and remain strongly present, transforming nature into both material and manifesto. The artist seeks to expose the fissures and contradictions of the world around us through a hybrid visual grammar, present in both the pop and scientific realms. He subverts botanical illustration to raise questions pertinent to our process of cultural colonization, the dominance of American capitalism, the environment, and the complexity of its climate crises.
Nature and its grandeur as representation are understood by the artist as a form of questioning, serving different purposes rather than functioning as a model of idealization. It takes on the contours of a political iconography in which silhouettes and shadows sometimes prevail over enchantment. The artist draws upon certain images to underpin the development of his reflections, allowing new meanings to emerge. One of the recurring features of his work is the construction of images developed from iconic Walt Disney figures, through which he employs critique, humor, and irony within the pop universe, using childhood characters that formed part of American hegemony and the colonization of our culture.
This encounter between worlds is present in the dominance of foreign cultural production and in the distinctive features of Joe Carioca or Donald Duck, now embedded within a tropical natural environment. This narrative seeks defining markers of nationality through characters that could be regarded as invasive and that, according to the artist’s assertions regarding American imperialism, would be colonizing our culture. Joe Carioca, a character developed by the Disney studios in the 1940s and a friend of Donald Duck, embodied the archetype of the malandro from Rio de Janeiro and was created during the period of the Good Neighbor Policy, adopted by President Franklin Roosevelt as a strategy to strengthen the United States government’s political ties with Latin American countries.
The artist employs these Disneyfied images through questioning aesthetic experiments, anchoring the dissolution of these visual representations in the addition—à la Giuseppe Arcimboldo—of an entanglement of leaves, feathers, or tropical fruits that challenges the notion of a fixed identity. This constitutes an important political iconography that produces a sense of estrangement and disjunction between the image and the real world. Through his critical awareness, Sergio Allevato lends philosophical and sensitive contours to his work as a form of warning, addressing imperialist domination, the process of colonization, and the urge to dominate nature, while maintaining a continuous focus of reflection within a contemporary orbit.
In the Collapse series, the narrative thread shifts toward other critical readings, still marked by the echoes of incessant global crises. Within this cartography populated by traces, there is greater fluidity in both brushwork and the use of color. We find no perceptual unity there, but rather imprecise contours and unexpected rhythms. These visual constructions evoke the idea of a disjointed, provocative, disturbing world endowed with a powerful corrosive force. Figures seem to emerge and disappear like organisms in a state of permanent mutation. Images flow freely, refusing any rational organization or linear narrative.
Within his iconography, we encounter a palette of symbols that invites us to contemplate resonances from art history: the devotional golden halos of Byzantine art; images that evoke the power of Michelangelo Buonarroti’s creative gesture; as well as interventions directed toward the adornments and ornamental elements found in the works of Gustav Klimt.
This pictorial universe is inhabited by fragmented elements laden with memory, traces, and layers of the past. Signs and symbols filled with uncertainty inhabit an ambiguous geography between physical space and the realm of the imaginary. These are sharp edges that call into question any possibility of serenity. The artist creates a new territorial identity and evokes new, incisive terms that function as warnings, drawing attention to the problems of our reality. A true manifesto.
Vanda Klabin
Curator