For SP-Arte Rotas, the booth proposes a friction between the historical production of Sérgio Lima (1939–2024) and the contemporary visuality of Luciano Maia (1987). Far from mere reverence for the past, the encounter proves that surrealist imagination, the capacity to create images that exceed the real, remains an urgent tool for tearing through the fabric of consensual reality. Sérgio Lima, a foundational articulator of Surrealism in Brazil and endorsed by André Breton, brings to his drawings and collages the solidity of a surrealist matrix built over decades. His work operates through the reclamation of the everyday transformed into magical space: common objects, banal gestures, and found images are displaced from their function and returned to the world as enigmas. By subverting images, Lima constructs a territory where the unconscious becomes method and imagination an instrument of knowledge.
On the other side of this temporal mirror, Luciano Maia, from Pará, updates this tradition of estrangement. His practice crosses the memories, mythologies, and folklore of northern Brazil with regional queer narratives. Moving between painting, ceramics, and collage, Maia plays with contrasts of luminosity and layering to build a fabled universe where myth does not illustrate reality but expands it. If in Lima the surreal image destabilizes the given world, in Maia the fantastic welcomes and celebrates dissidence and ancestrality. The most visceral point of contact between the two lies in their use of drawing and collage as acts of poetic surgery. Both Lima and Maia cut into the given world in order to paste over it the world they wish to inhabit. They refuse the factual chronicle of life, preferring the deeper truth of delirium and imagination, a truth only reached when the image surpasses the visible. By bringing Sérgio Lima's trajectory into dialogue with Luciano Maia's mythological pulse, this selection invites the public to enter a fold in time, where wonder and invention remain the most fertile territories of human freedom.