São Paulo, Brasil
06/11/2026 - 29/11/2026

José Manuel Ballester

Maravilha

In a conversation we had about his travels, José Manuel Ballester told me that when he comes to Brazil, he comes to paradise. He said it in a tone of observation, without the emphasis that the word usually requires, and then he began to speak of light, schedules, and buildings. The phrase stuck with me because, spoken by a Spaniard about Brazil, it repeats the oldest of the formulas with which Europe described these lands, and because the title under which his Brazilian photographs have been circulated, Maravilha, belongs to the same family of words. This exhibition brings together what he saw in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Niterói, Salvador and Brasilia, plus two recent series, dedicated to the building of the Guita and José Mindlin Brasiliana Library, at the University of São Paulo, and that of Unibes Cultural, where the images are now

shown.

Sérgio Buarque de Holanda dedicated his most erudite book to this formula. In Vision of Paradise, he follows the Edenic motives that guided the discovery and colonization of America and shows how the common places of tradition, the perpetual spring, the temperate air, the longevity of the inhabitants, were transferred to the description of lands that the chroniclers had before their eyes. The historian distinguishes the two Iberian peoples, since the Castilians, according to him, were more easily led by the wonderful, while the Portuguese subjected the same myths to an attenuation that made them plausible. Ballester is from Madrid and calls what he sees wonderful, but he takes the floor in the Brazilian meaning, the daily exclamation with which coffee or afternoon is approved here, so that his title contains both attitudes

.

Claude Lévi-Strauss arrived in São Paulo in 1935 to teach at the newly founded university, and the book in which he narrated the experience, Tristes Tropics, deals with what happens to the vision after arrival. The city seemed to him to be made of neighborhoods that aged before they were ready, and he extended to the cities of the New World the formula according to which they went from poverty to decrepitude without stopping in middle age. Those who call Brazil paradise after him know that they are talking about a place where time flies quickly over buildings, and Ballester’s photographs, with rain-stained concrete and modern buildings already marked by age,

record this speed.

Ballester was born in Madrid in 1960, graduated in Fine Arts and began as a painter before combining painting and photography in the 1990s, a path recognized by the Spanish National Photography Prize in 2010. In the series that made him famous, Hidden Spaces, he digitally removes the figures from canonical paintings, so that the Last Supper is reduced to the set table and The Girls to the Alcázar room. The same principle operates in architectural photographs, in which the Biennial pavilion appears with the ramps and pillars repeated to the bottom and no visitors, and the Oca is reduced to the curve of the dome and a handrail. The human presence appears indirectly, in the reflectors attached to the concrete and in the marks that the wooden formwork left on the surface, so that each building is offered as the vestige of a work and a use whose agents were

absent.

The relationship with Brazil began in 2007, when Ballester came to São Paulo with the critic Juan Manuel Bonet to photograph the city based on modern architecture, and later extended to Rio de Janeiro, Salvador and Brasília. Visitors will find here the Copan seen from above, the Municipal Market and the footbridges of Sesc Pompeia, the tile panel of the Capanema Palace, the circular room of the Niterói museum, the golden nave of Saint Francis in Salvador, Lina Bo Bardi’s staircase at Solar do Unhão and the blue stained glass windows of the Don Bosco Sanctuary, and will recognize that the foreign eye has almost always chosen what Brazilians built with the declared ambition to invent a country

.

The four photographs taken for this exhibition apply this view to the building that houses them. Designed by Roberto Loeb, the building on Rua Oscar Freire is known in the city for the shape it evokes the Torah scrolls, and Ballester photographed it up close and from the bottom up, placing the camera under the concrete rings that support the glass sheets and showing them in sequence, one inside the other, up to the opening through which the white sky enters. The photographs of the Brazilian Library come as the second term of a dialogue, because the University City building was designed by Eduardo de Almeida and Rodrigo Mindlin Loeb, Roberto’s son and José Mindlin’s grandson, so that the two buildings are linked by a blood kinship beyond language affinities, visible in apparent concrete and light filtered by blades before reaching the interior. There is also an affinity of program, since one building is shaped like a scroll, which is the book in its oldest figure, and the other was designed to hold codices, which are the figure that replaced it

.

A second subject crosses these images and distinguishes them from an inventory of monuments. In the Glass House, the trunk of a tree rises up the side of the stairs and the forest covers the spaces between the pilotis; in the Maria Luisa and Oscar Americano Foundation, vegetation covers the slabs and descends over the water bodies; in the Parque da Luz, the roots of a fig tree frame the clearing with the function that, in other photographs, fits a porch. I therefore return to the sentence at the beginning, because the paradise that Ballester speaks of is an entirely built place, made of ramps, domes and pilotis, in the middle of a nature whose abundance makes everything that rises in it temporary. His photographs suggest that this nature allows the buildings to continue to exist, uninhabited, so that the memory that we were once here echoes in them

.

Luiz Armando Bagolin