Mirante

Text by SP-Arte Rotas 2026 Artistic Director Bernardo Mosqueira on this edition's Mirante section.

(Above: Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato, Untitled, 1900–1995. © Courtesy of Gomide&Co)

First Study: On Landscape

Mirante is a section of SP-Arte Rotas featuring an exhibition curated by the fair's artistic director, bringing together outstanding works presented by participating galleries. In this edition, around seventy works produced over more than a century by more than fifty artists from Brazil and across Latin America invite us to question and expand the very idea of landscape, revealing the extraordinary diversity of ways of living, knowing, feeling, imagining, and creating the world that characterizes the continent's artistic production.

The works gathered here approach landscape in remarkably different ways. Rather than treating it as a genre of artistic representation, they present it as a field of imagination and reflection on the relationships between beings and their environments. Far from reducing landscape to a mere backdrop for human action, these works portray the earth, water, the city, the countryside, the forest, the night, dreams, animals, and human beings as equally vital agents participating in shared worlds. Gradually, landscape ceases to be the representation of a space observed from afar and instead challenges the very notion of distance, affirming relationships of continuity, interdependence, and coexistence among different forms of life.

When we stand before a landscape, we are confronted above all with our own ways of perceiving. We may ask not only what it reveals, but also what it renders imperceptible. At a time marked by the intensifying climate crisis and the growing concentration of power and resources, questioning landscape also means questioning the modern assumptions that have led us to this critical moment. This selection of works seeks to encourage reflection on the ways we have learned to separate nature from culture, humanity from the world, and self from other. Ultimately, recognizing ourselves as part of the Earth may also require imagining how the Earth perceives itself.

Bernardo Mosqueira

Artistic Director, SP-Arte Rotas