Saphira Ventura Gallery Presents
Solo exhibition by: Giovanna Gomes
On View: Sept 3–15, 2025
Opening: Wed, Sept 3 | 6–8 PM
Occults Surfaces — Geography of the Invisible presents a photographic investigation that invites the public to traverse the folds of the city, where the invisible reveals itself as a sensitive geography. From a transformative fifteen-day residency, Giovanna Gomes emerges as a narrator of contemplation: she does not merely record what is seen, but requests a presence that allows the eye to perceive new layers.
Curatorship and mentorship by Alcinda Saphira, in partnership with the New York International Contemporary Art Society and Saphira Ventura Gallery, with the support of Instituto Bienal Amazônia, articulate research, career guidance, and curatorial practice, gathering curators from diverse institutions and a public witness to the experience of observation.
Designed to inhabit the tempo of the city, the exhibition moves from the poetry of abstraction beyond a regional vocabulary, expanding the North-Northeastern tessitura to the metropolis of New York. Silence, materialized in stone, water, pigment, and shadow, gains a voice and reveals what lies beneath the surface: the city is not merely seen; it is felt — in the furrows of light, in the insinuated absences, in the tiniest details that insist on not disappearing. Thus, the visible becomes memory, the ordinary becomes poetic coincidence, the concrete becomes possibility.
Hidden Surfaces is a tribute to the patience of looking: what waits, what slowly reveals itself, and, in doing so, transforms the observer. The exhibition invites the public to traverse the city’s folds, not only to see but to inhabit the texture of the invisible, where time, materiality, and imagination converge to sediment meaning. May the aesthetic experience offered by the show dialogue with the body, with time, and with the courage to see beyond the immediate, providing a sensitive reading of the urban and a reverberation between what is visible and what is felt.
Giovanna Gomes is a Brazilian visual artist whose practice unfolds at the intersection of ancestry, memory, environment, and abstraction. Born in the Northeast of Brazil, she draws upon Black and Northeastern heritage as both subject and method, translating lived experience into a visual language that insists on presence and resists erasure. Her work engages with the materiality of the world—stone, soil, water, glass, and urban surfaces—transforming them through color and form into radiant abstractions.
These images are not descriptive documents but acts of invention: matter becomes metaphor, and texture becomes a site of imagination. In this process, Giovanna situates photography beyond its conventional function, opening it to the realm of the poetic and the political. Guided by the environment, her practice embodies what might be called a political abstraction: a mode where natural and urban fragments are reconfigured into chromatic fields that expose the tensions between visibility and invisibility, history and future, fragility and resilience.
This abstraction is not an escape from reality but a confrontation with it — foregrounding territories and bodies often relegated to the margins while asserting their centrality in a global artistic discourse. Giovanna’s work thus positions abstraction as a critical tool for reimagining presence, belonging, and ecology.
In her images, the environment is not backdrop but agent; each surface carries the weight of memory and the possibility of transformation. Her practice expands the possibilities of photography, proposing it as a field where history and landscape converge, and where vision itself becomes a form of resistance.
Immerse yourself in the full catalog of her exhibition at Saphira Ventura Gallery.
