I like to think of Gilson as an alchemist. Far from a mystical understanding of this figure, the allegory helps me understand his practice concerning his materials. Much like the search for the philosopher’s stone—the central and highest symbol of alchemical terminology, the mythical substance capable of turning base metals into noble ones, or even achieving human immortality—Gilson’s gaze works with summary attention and care on objects that our time has relegated to banality, such as rebar, metals, and stones. With each creation, the artist affirms the power of transmutation in the art object, whether visible or not. Adding to this comparison is a fact of reality: Plano is the son of a seamstress and a bricklayer. He channels their wisdom, handling and balancing rough stones with the delicacy of a thread.

For the Contratempo program, a miscellany of the artist’s works was chosen, orbiting between “raw” and noble materials, a distinction suspended in his work. In Depois da água a terra (After the water the land) (2021), a block of slate serves as a surface for the formation of islands resulting from the heat of two lamps on the thin layer of encaustic that covers the piece. If the stone alludes to Plano’s home—its recurrence in domestic use is so common that Brazil is the world’s second-largest consumer—the emergence of the islands rethinks the dimension of the crossing originating from Afro-Brazilian history, which extended over the waters and continued on Brazilian territory. The “deep Brazil that swallows the lights cast upon it” is felt under the soles of his feet, walking on slate as a child; it is estimated, however, that the mineral extracted today began to form during the Lower Paleozoic (a period defined between 417 and 545 million years ago). Becoming an index of Afro-Atlantic migrations, its presence here touches upon an expanded and silent listening.

The drawings Calor sem luz #5 and #6 (Heat without light #5 and #6) (2022) perforate the bathroom and the boudoir, like two views of a large lake or rock—similar to the natural elements of such abstract forms. These pieces are also obtained through heat, but this time, from its primary source: fire. Positioned parallel to each other on opposite sides of the same wall, the apparent translucency of the prints seems to offer a glimpse of faces of the same object, making a symbolic cut into the house’s architecture. In the Closet, the installation Dois pesos (Two weights) (2024) simulates the fall of 200 black pearls and 200 lead spheres arranged on the floor of the room and inside the wardrobe. It is a sibling to the installation O sol depois (The sun after) (2020), in which Plano arranges 152 pearls on the walls of the exhibition pavilion at the Museu de Arte do Rio, covering and re-covering each pearl inserted into the architectural structure. Here, in this house-museum, the artist puts his materials to the test of the gaze to highlight the absence of another element—the movement of life. By integrating the sound of the fall, he revives the immanence of an energy that vibrates in the displayed clothes, which became objects of pure contemplation after Eva Klabin’s passing.

In different operations, inversions of weight and materiality are achieved through the displacements and uses proposed by Plano. If, at first, the presence of the guest might seem strange to the pieces that originally inhabit the collection, the transmutation caused by the material, spatial, and temporal crossing between them not only revives dormant memories but also frees the house for the adventures of fiction.