Texts
2025
Yan Copelli's work presents itself as a disturbing inscription in the contemporary aesthetic regime, in which nothing is taken for granted and each form is traversed by tensions between visibility and opacity, desire and estrangement, attraction and repulsion. By creating objects that resemble crumbling architectural fragments and abstract organic forms—resonating with both the body and the plant world—Copelli does not attempt to stabilize meanings, but rather opens cracks and establishes discomfort zones. It is at this point that the notion of unease becomes key to understanding his poetics.
The aesthetic regime of Copelli's sculptures and paintings is based on a duality: art is autonomous, emancipated from utilitarian or representational functions, but it is also heteronymous, as it intervenes in the world as design and shifts sensibilities in the way of seeing, feeling, and thinking. This contradiction is irreducible and it gives rise to a structural unease: one never knows whether the work should be experienced as pure formal play or as representation, whether it should be interpreted as an intimate experience of form or as a collective allegory. It is in this undecided space that his sculptures and paintings gain vitality, reflecting the tensions of the contemporary world.
His work evokes, at the same time, eroticism and ruin, tropicality and exile. It possesses a physicality marked by heat, by the humidity of things that melt and slide, by the precariousness of forms destined for erosion and collapse. The eroticism that pulsates within it is often uncomfortable, desire emerges contaminated, crossed by prohibitions, forces of pleasure and repulsion. This body of work exposes both the intensity and the failure of forms of pleasure.
The unease is not simply a feeling of inadequacy in Yan Copelli. It is through what can be seen in his sculptures, an outer surface and, conversely, cracks and joints that also suggest a dark and unknown interiority. The works insist on ambiguous combinations of forms and symbols—sometimes tropical, sometimes architectural, sometimes corporeal—shifting what we recognize into the realm of strangeness that arises from the very tension between attraction and repulsion in design. Copelli's operation consists precisely in giving body to this unease — transforming the indecision of form into a “thing” and projecting a design in collapse because it is simultaneously beautiful and ugly. Thus, his works are machines of instability, devices that demand an active position from the viewer, which calls taste into question. There is no peaceful enjoyment, nor definitive interpretation, but rather an activation of discomfort at the limits of aesthetic experience. The viewer is emancipated insofar as, based on his or her perception, he or she must take responsibility for its meaning, invent its own interpretation, sustain the ambiguity, and decide for him or herself what he or she is seeing.
This discomfort is further intensified by the way Copelli rewrites artistic traditions. There are echoes of Maria Martins and Wifredo Lam, of Tunga and Louise Bourgeois, but never as reverent references. These are deviant evocations, which insert the surrealist and modernist heritage into a tropical present marked by sexual exhaustion and urban precariousness. The viewer does not know whether to see in them monuments of a degraded modernity, altars of desire, or archaeological remains of an aborted future. At the same time, his production dialogues with a global horizon, as if the local experience were transformed into an index of planetary tensions: environmental, social, and political collapses that transmute into displacements of desire and a canceled libido.
Copelli shows us, almost as a commentary, that contemporary art does not need to seek anesthesia and simplification, but rather intensifies it to the point of questioning its usefulness. His work does not propose a resolution, but insists on ambivalence: it is contaminated beauty, eroticism crossed with ruin, materiality that threatens to collapse. It is in this friction that the work finds its critical and poetic strength. The unease is not a side effect, but rather the very condition of the contemporary aesthetic experience.
Ricardo Sardenberg
Curator
Curator
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Yan Copelli Shifts the Everyday into the Sacred in Oh,holihole
Exhibition marks the artist’s third solo show at Galeria Sardenberg
Artist Yan Copelli opens Oh,holihole on September 25 at Galeria Sardenberg, Travessa Dona Paula, São Paulo. In this exhibition —his third solo at the gallery— Copelli presents a new body of sculptures and paintings in which he explores materiality, improvisation, and visual narratives that move between the sacred, the playful, and the everyday. The show is curated by Ricardo Sardenberg.
The exhibition focuses mainly on bronze and ceramic sculptures —some combining both materials— alongside paintings that serve as breathing points throughout the display. The works share a chromatic palette of metallic and earthy tones, developed by the artist through experiments with matte ceramic glazes, in dialogue with the opacity and reflections of bronze.
The sculptures evoke forms of towers, chapels, or improvised structures, while also recalling banal objects —cutlery, banana peels, food scraps— which acquire new meanings through the creative process. Between apparent fragility and structural resistance, a tension is always present: works that seem about to collapse yet remain upright, in a state of unstable balance. This logic conveys the sensation of improvisation or of a house of cards, reinforcing the tactile and experimental dimension of Copelli’s practice.
The paintings, figurative and populated by flowers and natural elements, engage in dialogue with the sculptures by sharing tonalities and atmospheres. While in his previous solo, Cosmic Slop Slop, Copelli evoked a nocturnal atmosphere, here the environment suggests a cloudy day, with diffuse golden light, akin to a sunrise or a twilight charged with uncertainty.
The exhibition title, Oh,holihole, plays ironically with the idea of the sacred, opening space for ambiguities and free associations. Between architectural references, erotic suggestions, and the insistent presence of elements that drip, lean, or seem on the verge of collapse, Copelli creates a universe where nature, the human body, and utilitarian objects intertwine, dissolving the boundaries between the animate and the inanimate.
With Oh,holihole, Yan Copelli deepens his investigation into the plastic and symbolic power of matter, presenting works that oscillate between collapse and survival, ruin and persistence.
Marina Consiglio
Jornalist
Jornalist
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2023
In the intimate space of the house, feet wear old socks and slippers as they shuffle across the floor. Privacy allows the uncompromising of clothes and posture. In bed, the body imagi-nes and dreams of anomalous beings and hy-brid forms. Outside this reserved field the logic seems to be different: the hurried walk on ur-ban sidewalks avoids banana peels and vomit, the dejection and the abject that sometimes disturb the vision and cause disgust.
Let’s recognize the hierarchy of the world: clean clothes are worth more than dirty ones, everything that is detritus is hidden, that which we understand as top is usually associated with the head which, together with the hands, commonly serves as a metaphor for human thought and intelligence - as opposed to the feet, so close to the ground, relegated to the task of responding to brain commands and transporting the body. What is low is not just a place, it is a value.
In Cosmic Slop Slop, Yan Copelli gives visibility to mundane images that we often choose not to see or show. The old flip-flops, the scrotum, the frayed sock, the black water coming out of the faucet, the withered petals, leaves and stems, fit with toes that are too long, but also that which we cannot name, forms that do not allow themselves to be classified, shuddering the boundaries between human and inhuman.
These limits are blurred without, however, Copelli’s creatures being the junction of peo-ple and machines. The cosmos created by the artist is not that of cyborgs. We do not see in it a dehumanization of people turned into things, but rather the humanization of objects and vegetables. The sculpture Relax, of the used sock that gains a face, is made with some shades of gray that refer to the fabric loaded with sweat, the object turned creature is the one that had contact with the heat of the skin and the fluids of the body. The used piece of clothing does not become disposable, dead from the point of view of its use value: some-one has been there, put it on, this is what gives it a certain survival. This, by the way, seems to be the principle that governs all the sculptures here: for them to have value, they must have been considered useless.
But what happens, then, when what is of the order of the dirty, the disposable, the disgust-ing and the useless returns? These beings created by Copelli do not return as the mon-strous that has been repressed, they do not haunt. Think of David Cronenberg’s films, full of viscera, blood, strange bodies, unusual living forms: the themes are close to those chosen by Copelli. The treatment given to them, however, seems diametrically opposed. In Cosmic, it is not a matter of shocking the observer by stom-ach-churning. Everything that comes from the underworld appears in a harmless and, in some cases, even graceful way. This is what we see in the sculpture Passeio, of the banana peel that balances itself as slender legs parade by. Or even in the painting Bicho, in which two feet and leg potatoes connect to a scrotal sac rep-resented without a penis. Free of the connotation of the dominating masculine that usually accompanies it, it is transfigured into a small, sympathetic head.
If the figures presented here do not come to disturb us, it does not seem right to say that they come to impress or take the place of that which dominates and oppresses. More than subverting the hierarchy of the world, these works seem to dissolve it: what was at the bot-tom of the pyramid does not occupy the top. Everything is side by side. What do these beings want? The right to exist. In order to conquer it, they do not occupy large spaces, they do not overshadow the rest of the world, they are not violent. They exist calmly, in a kind of aloof-ness. That, it seems to me, is their great value: far away from phallic disputes, without offer-ing majesty, smoothness, cleanliness, fresh-ness, they conquer their plenitude. This appears even in Slop Slop, the only sculpture made of bronze. The material, more noble than those of the other pieces, comes closer to them by what gives it form: the liquid of viscous resemblance that comes out of a cavity. This is also true of the sculpture Escorrega and the painting Ponte, the largest pieces in the set. The banana peel, associated with the possibility of falling, gains weight and size to become what its name an-nounces: a slide, a construction that invites the body to play and indiscipline. The great feet of Ponte’s painting, despite their pioneering pos-ture in nature, do not carry hands capable of destroying the environment. They lead them-selves, for what seems to count is the walk, the course.
Cosmic Slop Slop could be read as the possible dream of the Anthropocene. Lush nature gives way to the garden of anomalies, the human head, which was only capable of thinking up edifying but also destructive projects, is gone. The hands are melting like candles. In this sce-nario of ruin, to dream of material abundance, Apollonian visuality, and the empire of novelty seems like a trap, an attempt to return to the past that is no longer coming back. These are times of wreckage. Copelli’s pieces challenge us to form a kind of imaginary against the grain, a community in which everything and everyone that has been associated with the field of shame or thrown in the trash can can fi-nally exist without being relegated to the status of leftovers, to use anthropologist Maria Elvira Diaz’s expression. In the middle of the end of the world, the party of those who have always been left out of the party.
Natália Leon
Researcher in Philosophy of Art
--Researcher in Philosophy of Art
2021
Chimeras in a State of Dream
"How could we disenchant the world, if our laboratories and factories create hundreds of hybrids every day, even stranger than the previous ones, to populate it?"
- Bruno Latour
Eyes are staring at us everywhere, a kind of excessive pareidolia1. They emerge from non-human and extra-human surfaces; they occupy the center of an irregular flower, project from a mysterious blue background, or humanize a simple pair of underwear. Nothing here speaks the same language, but everything insists on communicating. In the face of our constant inability to distinguish reality from fiction, how can we tell where fantasy begins and ends? Thus is the feeling upon encountering this first solo exhibition by Yan Copelli: a strange familiarity.
As Copelli transforms the most absurd fragments into characters, it's possible to say that he brings us closer to the territory of fable, a literary genre where the displacement from reality serves lessons of morality. However, we know that every moral space is also fertile ground for perversion. In these narrative-deprived paintings, what might seem cute or naive quickly transforms into unsettling aberration (is the open-mouthed sunflower singing in jubilation or emitting a scream of horror?). Similarly, it's not uncommon to see an erotic contour in these ambiguous creatures. They exhibit phallic, anal, and vaginal shapes that take on various whims, between elongated stems, carpels, and orifices that lie between childish imagination and polymorphic perversion. While they tempt seduction, they are also grotesque in their own way, claiming the oddness of deformed and somewhat monstrous beings, reminding us that it is the property of pictorial creation to metamorphose the very flesh of the image. For this reason, the artist's characters - seeming to have migrated from an eccentric animated drawing - do not serve any law, but exist as fragments that assume bizarreness (so incongruous in times of Instagrammable appearances) as the protagonist. They are hybrids, mosaics, chimeras gestated in a state of dream, simultaneously creatures of social reality and beings emerging from fictional speculation. They lead us to necessarily contradictory stimuli and resist any unambiguous meaning.
Curiously, these figures assert themselves against abstract backgrounds, as if suspended in space-time. They belong to no geography, fetishize no cultural identity, on the contrary, they seek a certain deterritorialization. They lack gender. Are they virtual? Phantom-like? Hallucinated? What we know is that, despite their somewhat silent appearance, their fragmentation is a kind of rebellion and insubordination, a property of what is monstrum. And such suspension acts as if it were repositioning and mixing both the notions of nature and culture. One is no longer an object of appropriation of the other, but reflective conditions of mutual engenderment. Hence, we remember that "every living being is only a recycling of its body, a patchwork blanket made from ancestral matter," as Emanuele Coccia so aptly teaches.
It wouldn't be absurd to also identify in Copelli's repertoire an echo of Tarsila at its most delirious; the penumbral and metaphysical contours of an Ismael Nery or the concealed and ambivalent abstraction of a Cícero Dias. To those who insist that the dreamlike has never been a major theme in Brazilian painting, I suggest they revisit their routes. Here, artistic practice indicates that the territory of fantasy is a privileged space to generate images that expand the negotiable horizons of the possible - a fundamentally political operation.
As for the sculptures, both those made of clay and resin, covered with oil paint, and the glazed ceramics, they present a shiny aspect of something still fresh and moist, as if simultaneously in a process of structuring and decomposition. They appear smeared, smeared with paint, spat out from a giant's mouth. Legs, arms, and other anthropomorphic fragments resemble invertebrate animals - worms crawling on the shattered ground of reality while displaying kitsch flowers. In another corner, a half-torn sock serves as a vase for a real sunflower, both nostalgic for an impossible reintegration. They are leftovers of an apocalypse, remnants of a faded organic matter. Post-extra-beyond-human entities that agitate circuits and modes of subjectivity, or a certain melancholy disguised as cuteness.
The other day, while we were talking, Copelli told me that these works (all made from 2020 onwards, in a pandemic context) were created during long sessions into the early hours of the morning. Perhaps that's why they have the luminosity of a lit candle. The light continuously expands and contracts, like the spectrum of a flame. They are delirious patches that take us by the hand in the darkness of the present. In the face of the world's disenchantment, they whisper that nothing is more real than nonsense.
- Pareidolia: A common psychological phenomenon, known for causing people to recognize images of human or animal faces in objects, shadows, clouds, light formations, or any other random visual stimulus. This occurs due to the brain's natural tendency to seek familiar patterns and meanings in ambiguous or chaotic stimuli.
Pollyana Quintella
Research, Curation & Cultural Critique
Research, Curation & Cultural Critique