Quirks of Time
Renato De Cara
What vocabularies might be available to us, across distinct discourses, to access a common ground in the language of affection among the inherited structures each of us carries? Perhaps the forms and colors of drawings, the flirtation with collective iconographies and the subjectivity of the subconscious, while reinforcing symbolic meanings, point toward a convergence of poetics, creating tensions and connections. With this in mind, and taking the line as a guiding thread, we bring into dialogue three bodies of work—one of my own and others by fellow artists—which, through marks, colors, questions, and answers, converse with the embroideries I have been making for nearly two years while caring for my mother.
At ninety-five years old, my mother, Bertha Eunice, still delights in the surprise of drawing. Her crochet pieces and her questions, amid the fragility of her memory, inspired me to develop an unpretentious and affectionate tapestry, interweaving my own doubts and the love contained in the time we still have together. A blessing. It is the way I found to continue expressing emotion beyond words, knowing that beauty persuades. The constructive references come from appropriations of a varied repertoire—diverse readings, novels, research, and other writings, as well as virtual stimuli and the culture of popular sayings. Technically, the grid of the canvas is disrupted by the absence of structural planning, allowing spontaneity in the making. Lines and colors overlap with my mother's crochet circles and her cognitive lapses, alongside assorted objects such as costume jewelry, keepsakes, and small gifts gathered during our encounters. Morro no fim, à moda da casa (“I Die at the End, House Style”) is now presented as a series and a tribute to the woman who taught me so much. “It is not because I am leaving that I no longer care,” I read in an obituary quoted in a book by Vinciane Despret on communication between the living and the dead.
If loneliness is the opposite of humanity, we also present the search for an inherited legacy adopted by Michel CENA7 and his adoptive mother, Raquel Ramalho. He, a Black man with a long artistic trajectory that began with graffiti and street tagging in the industrial region of São Paulo known as the ABC, and she, trained in psychology, with her affectionate crochet practice. Together, mother and son have been developing the series The Name of Things—he through bold, flat fields of color revisiting Afro-religious symbols and the forms of Brazilian Constructivism, and she by overlaying these paintings with her delicate woven structures and crocheted ornaments. The title of this exhibition emerged as we listened to Michel speak about his need to recognize himself in familiar mannerisms and to combine his love with the act of making together. How fortunate we are to witness such tenderness.
As a special guest, Leila de Sarquis, who also has a long-standing presence in the art scene, occupies a room with paintings, an installation table, and above all with her series Dar a Ver (To Make Visible), composed of embroidered drawings in which the unpretentiousness of pen scribbles is overlaid with fine, tangled, undomesticated threads, deconstructing linear thought. Her universe presents a reinterpretation of love and disconnection amid emotional whirlwinds, in small-scale formats. “Ever since I was in a mother’s womb, my soul has been telling me stories, and nothing should be erased by doubts about language. Art is overflow,” says Leila. Mentored by the Surrealist Sérgio Lima (1939–2024), the artist wandered through automatic writing, allowing the flow of thought to suggest narratives. Through drawings, writings, paintings, sculptures, installations, assemblages, and embroideries, her art provokes an abyss, “in the sense of astonishment and the strangeness of its visitations,” according to her mentor.
At Carmo Johnson Projects, and among the gallery’s staff, we found the ideal environment of welcome and support, within a program committed to craftsmanship and to forms of production that extend beyond the dictates of the market. Thus, we gather here in dialogues that blur the finitude of worldly things, in search of the (mis)understanding of time, until no more.
Renato De Cara, May 2026
“We have much weaving to do. We need to appreciate the extraordinary opportunity created by the possibility of freely combining the most diverse elements of customs and traditions from across the planet. The interpretation of human cultures, which began hundreds of thousands of years ago and has culminated in the current explosion of local experiences available for global consumption, is an incalculable wealth of possibilities for our species. There are threads of every kind that need to be interwoven into beautiful original patterns—threads that in the past destroyed one another, but that today must be combined in different colors, textures, and materials so that they may cross, support, and enhance one another.”
Sidarta Ribeiro, Dream Manifesto (Companhia das Letras)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: Ana Lu Martins Jimenes; Claudia Apóstolo; Liana das Neves; Luanna Jimenes; Setsuko Katayama.
Lenora de Barros
To weave, embroider, and crochet may be delicate ways of conversing with time.
Each stitch depends on the one before it, just as days do, just as memory does.
In the exhibition Quirks of Time, artists engage in dialogue through works that share the gesture of weaving images—two of them in collaboration with their mothers:
Leila de Sarquis, Michel CENA7 and Raquel Ramalho, Bertha Eunice and Renato De Cara.
Crochet pieces, embroideries, paintings, and drawings incorporating threads, seams, and reliefs compose a universe of textures in which the viewer’s gaze is enveloped by colors, forms, and varying tactile densities. These works are created in hybrid fields where the handmade gesture makes the duration of time visible.
In the works created by Renato De Cara in collaboration with his mother, crochet functions as a language within an affective territory. They are maps of memory in which time is organized into layers, edges, centers, and detours. There is something talismanic about these works—objects that condense everyday gestures, intimate recollections, and silent signs. Incorporated into the pieces are chains, brooches, beads, buttons, and small fragments that function as traces of shared histories. Tiny things rescued from the drawers of forgetting and reinserted into a new constellation of affection.
The time of crochet is not the accelerated time of productivity but rather a tactile, slow, intimate, almost respiratory time, radically opposed to the frenetic rhythm in which we now live.
Yet the works of De Cara and Bertha escape nostalgia. They do not illustrate memories but reinvent ways of remembering together. Threads function almost like thoughts. There is something of language in these weavings—a silent, tactile writing, almost autobiographies meant to be read with the eyes.
In Michel CENA7’s paintings, geometric and chromatic forms rooted in the Constructivist tradition coexist with threads, fringes, crochet, and small textile reliefs, also ornamented through the collaborative gaze of his adoptive mother, Raquel Ramalho, and seeming to escape the surface of the canvas. The compositions evoke symbolic landscapes, archaic signs, and imagined architectures. A delicate tension emerges between formal rigor and gesture: geometry encounters craft, while painting allows itself to be transformed by the physical presence of fabric and thread.
In the works presented by Leila de Sarquis, embroidery merges with the lines of delicate drawings. Fragile, almost narrative figures seem to emerge directly from the fabric itself, like memories that insist on remaining visible. Loose threads, exposed seams, and unfinished forms outline a kind of poetic diary made of threads, scars, and small fabulations.
Among these creations, the thread ceases to be merely a material and becomes thought, memory, and a gesture of persistence. Weaving surfaces, textures of images, and affections, the works seem to seek ways of stitching time together—not to repair it completely, but to create possible connections among fragments: between past and present, between body and remembrance, between what dissolves in memory and what still insists on remaining.
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