It

is with great pleasure that we present Thix’s first solo show at the gallery, ‘Requiem for a Name’, with 28 unpublished portraits created especially for the exhibition at Galeria Silvia Cintra + Box 4, which opens to the public on 28 November.

Thix explores autobiographical issues such as mourning and transition, combined with the celebration of collective histories of non-normative identities.  He brings dissident bodies to paintings of historical reference that evoke the honorific portrait – images of power and respect, to build his own queer pinacothèque as a ‘work-manifestation’, in an operation that will claim the presence of bodies interdicted by dominant modes of discourse and narrative construction.

Occupying the exhibition space in a dense manner, reminiscent of an 18th or 19th century art salon, it tensions the temporal scale and allows the works – and lives – to dialogue with each other, highlighting shared experiences about the processes by which people think and constitute their own subjectivities. The result is a sensitive overlap between artwork and biography, which emphasises the aesthetic and political dimensions of the paintings.

In elle painting, elle examines familiar genres – in portraiture and identities – in a dissident appropriation of the canon that complexifies the personal and the political, centres and borders, the etheric and corporeality.  Portrait painting has one of its most elementary characteristics: to exalt and produce presence, a constant exchange of glances, an intimate negotiation between seeing and being seen.

Thix studied drawing and painting at the Florence Academy of Art (Italy) and the Barcelona Academy of Art (Spain), with a stint at the Grand Central studio in New York. In 2021, he was selected for the International Figurative Competition (MEAM) and the Royal Society of Portrait Painters (UK). In 2022 he took part in the artist residency programme at Casa da Escada Colorida (Rio de Janeiro), and last year he took part in the Uncool Artist Residency in Brooklyn (New York). Between 2023 and 2024 elle took part in the following group shows: Solar dos Abacaxis and Centro Cultural dos Correios (Rio de Janeiro); the 15th Salão dos Artistas sem Galeria promoted by Mapa das Artes (São Paulo); the III Black Rio Biennial (Rio de Janeiro); GAS Verão (Rio de Janeiro); the Marp Exhibition Programme (Ribeirão Preto); ‘What makes you look at the sky?’ at Centro Cultural dos Correios (Rio de Janeiro). In 2024 elle won the Garimpo das Artes Award from DasArtes magazine, through which elle undertook a residency at FAAP, São Paulo.