Ateliê Casa Um, SP | group exhibition
“A Chama de uma Centelha”
Group exhibition from the mentorship Flamma I
Production and Curator: Mariana Bortoluzzi
April.2026
Place: Ateliê Casa Um, São Paulo/Brazil
Work exhibited: “Study of the Sun I”
is the instant when raw matter awakens to itself—a flash, an intuition. An incandescent point of light that cleaves the darkness before the eyes can comprehend it. This fiery particle, taking the form of a spark, a flash or an ember, seemingly flying solo, emerges with an electrifying force, without control or awareness of its own energy and power. Yet, however insignificant it may feel, this brief flare is fertile enough to kindle a bonfire or spread and set an entire forest ablaze.
Over the past two months, 23 Brazilian visual artists living in Brazil, Europe and the United States took part in the first edition of Flamma—the mentoring and critical-curatorial guidance programme of Spiritual in Art, a platform I founded and where I conduct research. With my guidance and encouragement, the group, whose practices already shared an interest in exploring spiritual, metaphysical and invisible properties, was able to broaden and refine its research, transmute old beliefs and expand its practice, reaching, in resonance, the highest point of its artistic and spiritual journey to date.
Through the exchange of experiences, both positive and complex, surrounding the vastness of fire during our gatherings, the insight was channelled that this natural element needed to guide the exhibition like a torch. As this period unfolded, the artists were often, even to their own surprise, striking one stone against another to create a spark. And although they experienced the entire process collectively, each discovered their own timing, rhythms, feelings and possibilities for artistic creation, in a daily exercise intended, figuratively, to invite a bolt of lightning to strike their minds, bringing the messages that could be portrayed in this exhibition.
Gnostic traditions held that every human being possesses a scintilla animae—a spark of the soul—a seed of light or a fragment of a greater God-fire seeking to return to its source. The concept took shape in medieval mysticism, particularly through the theologian Meister Eckhart, who maintained that this spark resides in the depths of the soul, at the meeting point between the human and the divine, or the Higher Self. It is within this innermost core that we connect with the whole. The spark is the invisible sun at the centre of the human being: at once the smallest thing and the most essential.
The Corpus Hermeticum and the Emerald Tablet, attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, reveal that primordial fire does not belong to us; we are made of it. The seven Hermetic principles that structure this cosmology run through the territory of this exhibition, particularly three: the principle of Correspondence, encapsulated in the maxim “as above, so below”, which reveals that the inner flame and the fire of the cosmos are the same force on different scales; the principle of Vibration, according to which nothing is at rest and everything pulses at shifting frequencies, like fire itself, which is never the same for two consecutive instants; and the principle of Polarity, which teaches that light and shadow, creation and dissolution, are not absolute opposites but degrees within the same spectrum. In this view, darkness does not precede fire by accident; it is the condition that makes fire visible.
The exhibition begins with fire in its most earthly, ardent and ancestral form, moving through interpretations of fiery imagery until it reaches a state of greater transcendence. There are references to alchemy, where fire is the great agent of transformation, in the marriage between the sun and the moon. To the alchemical Great Work, which passes through the black of putrefaction and the white of purification to the red of the philosopher’s stone, when the alchemical egg opens to reveal gold. Tarot is also invoked, with Wands as the suit of fire, resonating in one of the pieces in this exhibition and evoking expansion through sharing and collective ritual. Carl Gustav Jung’s psychic individuation is also present: in the passage through one’s own inner densities as a condition for ascending to higher states of consciousness, culminating here, within the Vedic tradition, in the figure of Agni, the deity of fire. In the Bhagavad Gita, a sacred Hindu text: “not lighting the fire means refusing to accept the command of the self”.
The works gathered here traverse this symbolic field through different artistic languages and techniques: painting in oils, acrylics, watercolours, soft and oil pastels, pigments and spray paint; staged, multiple-exposure and expanded photography; video, projection and installation; ceramic sculpture; and hand-embroidered textiles incorporating words or fragments of mirror, decorative stones and trimmings. The unconscious erupts in dreamlike landscapes, chromatic veils, processes of transmutation, peaks of channelling, connections with nature and the cosmos, portals and rituals.
In The Psychoanalysis of Fire, Gaston Bachelard proposed that fire is the element that most invites rêverie, that floating state between dreaming and waking in which the imagination deepens rather than disperses. In The Flame of a Candle, Bachelard explored the enchantment of a solitary flame and what it can awaken in the dreamer, and it is from this thought that the title of this exhibition emerges: the presence of a flame born from the smallest thing that, as it endures over time, sheds ever more light. The spark is this inner calling within the artists; the flame, the energy the work emits when it encounters another. A single spark is enough to set ignition in motion; a single work that touches its own true depth can illuminate those who contemplate it. This is the invitation extended by the exhibition and the programme from which it arose: for each person to recognise the spark that belongs to them and, in doing so, kindle it.
Text: Marina Bortoluzzi
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ARTISTS
ANA AUGUSTA SILVEIRA
ANA CAROLINA VIDEIRA
A TRANSÄLIEN
CAROLINA LEAL
CYNTHIA LOEB
DANIEL SUL
EMILIA BRANDÃO CARNEIRO
GIA PORTAL
GIULIA D’ANDREA
ISABELLA D’ELIA
JADE PAMPLONA
JULIA ROGENSKI
JULIE SOPHIE
KATRYN BEATY
KIKA SIMONSEN
LÍA MATOS
MARIA VICTÓRIA SZALOCK
OLIVIA NACHLE
PALOMA GOVÊA
PAMELA LAHAUD
PAULO KURAZUMI
RENATA BARRETO
THAIS BERTOLIN