Iran Do Espírito Santo. Tracing Thought. 2002-2025

Iran do Espírito Santo. Tracciare il pensiero. 2002-2025
(Tracing Thought. 2002-2025)
Mazzoleni, Turin
29 October 2025 – 10 January 2026

Mazzoleni presents Tracciare il pensiero. 2002-2025 (Tracing Thought. 2002-2025), the first solo exhibition in Turin by Brazilian artist Iran do Espírito Santo. Opening on 29 October during Torino Art Week, the exhibition spans nearly 1,000 squared metres of the gallery’s principal exhibition space, offering a unique retrospective insight into do Espírito Santo’s practice over the past two decades.

The project presents new site-specific works conceived specifically for the show in the spaces of the gallery’s piano nobile, creating an intimate dialogue with the surrounding architecture. An internationally renowned artist whose works are held in major collections including MAXXI in Rome, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, do Espírito Santo has conceived the exhibition as a reflection on his own production, with a focus on two key concepts: light and scale.

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Switch (2025) is a new site-specific wall painting belonging to one of the artist’s most iconic series: composed of 56 shades of grey. As do Espírito Santo explains:

The wall pieces (drawings and paintings) play an important role in my production. To me, wall pieces are ‘resistance pieces’, that are there, despite our commodity-obsessed society. All this is to say that the ephemerality of it becomes part of the condition of having it done, and maybe adds another poetic layer, like an art of time as well as space.

Scale—understood as a unit of measure and proportion—is also magnified in two new works produced specifically for this exhibition: Metro and Compasso (Meter and Compass) (both 2025). As is often the case in do Espírito Santo’s work, both are built exactly like their real-life counterparts, but on a monumental scale: the compass stands 1.80 metres tall. Here, the artist reflects on the aura and function of the object, transforming it into a metaphor for the human condition. The works appear as objects caught between the world of ideas—the geometric and measuring principles they replicate in scale—and reality, the desire to become functional things.

Reflexive Windows (2020) are realised in black granite, polished and honed to create, through a process of removal, the silhouette of a window. According to the quantity of light on either side of the glass, they become almost a mirror, reflecting instead of allowing light to pass through. These works generate an ambiguity: are we looking in or looking out? Is there anyone looking at us from the other side of the window?

The Curtains series (2025) is presented here in a new vertical version: meticulous graphite drawings inspired by the detail of drapery, composed of intricately drawn lines repeated at one-millimetre intervals. These lines trace rhythms of scale and proportion that transform the flatness of the page, proposing a conceptual meditation on the tension between lightness and weight, between the world of ideas and the material world. Part of a series to which the artist returns periodically, the drawings start out from the outline of a real curtain in heavy, baroque velvet, seen during a stay in Rome. As the artist explains:

I draw constantly, out of both psychological and physical necessity. But when I draw ‘seriously,’ with a clear purpose, it’s like building something that has mass, yet is also partially freed from the tyranny of physics.

The exhibition is completed by historical works such as the Globe series (2011), ethereal white marble sculptures that embody the tension between the weight of matter and formal lightness, a fundamental characteristic of do Espírito Santo’s research. These works, through their physical presence and the purity of the material, dialogue with the surrounding space, creating a balance between solidity and conceptual transparency.

The symbolic path of Tracing Thought concludes with Untitled (Key Hole) (2002), a work the artist chose to exhibit after seeing the gallery’s structure and its sequence of rooms aligned along a central axis. The corridor suggests “an almost cinematic visual experience” that guides the viewer’s gaze and interacts with the artworks in each room. The most perfect inversion of the curtain is the keyhole: a reflecting and undeniably three-dimensional sculpture in which it is not possible to know which side of the hole we find ourselves on.

The exhibition brings together a collection of works which reaffirm the difficulty, or even the impossibility, of establishing where we are observing them from. Are we inside looking out, or outside looking in? The works of Iran do Espírito Santo reference a stimulating ambiguity, carefully constructed regarding the perspective from which they are observed—subtle variations that shift perception, for the artist as much as the viewer.

On the occasion of the exhibition, a catalogue will be published featuring a critical text by Jacopo Crivelli Visconti. The volume will present the works shown in the Turin exhibition as well as those in the subsequent show at Mazzoleni Milan, running from 21st January to 28th March 2026.

Iran Do Espírito Santo. Tracing Thought. 2002-2025

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