Teresinha and Valeska Soares: Desire That Reproduces

Here lies the conflict we all know well: what to assimilate and what to reject from what was passed down to us by our parents? It’s common to run away, trying to carve out our own path. Yet, there is always a mysterious element of our lineage that we cannot shake off. And it is precisely this telepathic force that flows between a mother and a daughter that may be captured in the project presenting, for the first time, the work of artist Teresinha Soares in dialogue with that of Valeska Soares at Gomide&Co’s booth at SP-Arte Rotas 2025.

With a relatively brief artistic output, spanning about ten years, Teresinha Soares (1927, Araxá) forged new paths in the landscape of Brazilian art. Active between 1966 and 1976, she absorbed the turbulence of those countercultural times and brought it to the surface within the heart of Minas Gerais high society. Not without controversy, as the newspaper headlines of the time reveal: “Painter who scandalizes ‘society’ to exhibit in SP”; “Painter Teresinha fears no ‘sexual taboo’”; “The daring art of Teresinha Soares”; “She wins every biennial of eccentricity”; “Teresinha Soares and art as a volcano of Eros”; “Who’s afraid of Teresinha Soares?”

In one, the body, desire, and eroticism are laid bare; in another, doubt and mystery prevail

— Fernanda Morse

Long dormant, the Teresinha volcano has been reactivated in recent years, with works once again circulating in major group exhibitions such as The World Goes Pop (2015) and Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 (Hammer Museum / Brooklyn Museum, 2017; Pinacoteca de São Paulo, 2018), along with a survey at MASP (2017) and, more recently, a solo show at Gomide&Co gallery. Having explored mediums such as painting on canvas and wood, as well as screen printing—alongside performances, happenings, and related practices—Teresinha Soares found in gesture, in the twisting, distortion, and coupling of bodies, a way to reorganize affections and the role of women in her time, liberating them from the position of object to that of subject.

Valeska Soares (1957, Belo Horizonte), in turn, says she became an artist “by surprise,” since she hadn’t initially chosen that path. “Growing up, you never want to be like your mother, right?” she explains. She studied architecture, and it was while working in the field that she became interested in the poetic dimension of building and inhabiting spaces, which led her to art. She began in the late 1980s, creating sculpture, and has since moved across various media, including installation, painting, and video. She often says she’s not attached to any particular technique or material, allowing herself to be guided by what each work demands during its conception.

For about 30 years, Valeska lived in New York, and she now lives and works in São Paulo. In 2009, she inaugurated a pavilion at Instituto Inhotim with Folly, a video installation previously shown at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005. Between 2017 and 2018, she had exhibitions revisiting her entire body of work, held at the Phoenix Art Museum and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in the United States, and at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo in Brazil. She will soon open a solo exhibition at Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, the gallery that represents her in São Paulo.

The creative force passed from mother to daughter is the story of a desire that reproduces

— Fernanda Morse

“Intimacy was theater”

At first glance, the frontal and narrative character of Teresinha’s work seems to contrast with the subtle manner in which Valeska develops hers. In one, the body, desire, and eroticism are boldly affirmed and exposed; in the other, suggestion, ambiguity, and mystery prevail. They are distinct rhetorics: the body, present in legs, arms, and entrails in Teresinha’s works, manifests itself through language in Valeska’s universe, with the “legs” of the chair, the “foot” of the table, and the “headboard” of the bed introducing the domestic landscape.

While one focuses on the characters, the other gives voice to what might be the décor of the scene. These are different ways of approaching intimacy. Suddenly, they begin to speak to each other: “I started noticing familiarities I had never perceived before, because I had never placed one work beside the other to look at them this way,” Valeska says about the project.

Amid the sinuous lines of the Eurótica series (1970) and the contours of the headboards in Unhinged (2017), the sensuality of the body extends to the edges of the bed. Breasts that are mouths, buttocks, and phalluses. Did someone pass through there? What might have happened in each of those beds of which we see only the heads? “The bed is where you’re born, where you die, make children, make love, rest, and dream…” says Teresinha in an interview, commenting on the work Ela me deu a bola (camas) (1970), in which she installed beds directly on the floor of the exhibition space.

These interiors are shaped both by an artist who was also an actress and playwright, and by an artist who is also an architect—together reinventing what happens within four walls. For the poet Ana Cristina Cesar, in her book A teus pés (1982), “Intimacy was theater.” Voilà a lineage that, through the staging of intimacy, subverts the norms of the domestic sphere—that supposedly feminine domain.

On the Discourse of Love

“I like to say that she talks about sex and eroticism, and I talk about love,” Valeska notes. If, on the surface, this contrast might suggest that the daughter has renounced a certain radicality present in the mother’s work, one need only recall what Roland Barthes writes in the entry “The Obscene of Love” in his Fragmentos de um discurso amoroso (1977) to intuit the opposite. After all, love can be even more obscene than sex—more disturbing and painful to stage than a sexual encounter.

On the other hand, of course Teresinha also speaks of love. There is tenderness in both the box-form and painted versions of her Caixa de fazer amor (1967)—a playful tenderness that blends game and pleasure, “sex” and “luck,” as the canvas reads. Meanwhile, Unhinged carries in each second-hand headboard the trace of a former meeting point. Stripped of their function, the objects no longer signal a place for making love but connect through memories that are at once intimate and collective. The title itself contrasts with the continuous chain of the work: in English, unhinged refers to a state of emotional instability, the moment when connections are severed. I think of it as the stage of un-love in a relationship’s story.

Ultimately, there is love in dialogue. The creative force that is passed from mother to daughter tells the story of a desire that reproduces—a form of connection that transcends the tensions and challenges of family relationships. And it endures: take the work of the young artist Isadora Soares Belletti, Teresinha’s granddaughter and Valeska’s niece. May we continue to celebrate such lineages, to make space for speculation and storytelling with and about our mothers—both real and chosen.

Fernanda Morse is a writer, researcher, translator, and curator. She holds a master’s degree and a bachelor’s degree in Literary Theory from the University of São Paulo. Her work operates at the intersection of Visual Arts and Literature, encompassing research, criticism, and curatorial projects. She has a particular interest in experimental and collaborative processes based on close dialogue with artists. Living between France and Brazil, she has been dedicated to building bridges between the artistic scenes of both countries.