Controle | Corrosão | Dispersão", by Beto Shwafaty at Galeria Leme

Photo: Filipe Berndt
A Lubrax oil drum, a riding saddle, and an American flag form a structure of apparent solidity, but in permanent tension, in "Dark Horse [Black Rider]", one of about 15 works gathered in this solo exhibition by Beto Shwafaty at Galeria Leme. In "Controle | Corrosão | Dispersão", the artist uses everyday objects and their materialities to think about how historical, economic, and social processes are inscribed in them, functioning as interfaces that simultaneously hide and reveal structural tensions. The three terms in the title do not organize the exhibition into thematic nuclei, but name recurring operations: control as a mechanism for administering bodies and territories, corrosion as the continuous wear of social forms, and dispersion as the unequal distribution of these effects, difficult to attribute to a single event or agent. Among the works are "Sugar in the veins" (2017), on tracing paper with burnt sugar, tea, and coffee, the inédito work "The dream of the land is the American dream", which brings together a baseball bat, a crowbar, handcuffs, and a red cap, and "Shock" (2019), whose form simultaneously refers to an electoral urn, a ballistic shield, and the observation windows of armored vehicles.