Lights, yes. No cameras, okay. And, correct, we must agree: there’s quite a bit of action here, spreading across the exhibition space. In his first solo exhibition at an institution, Raphael Medeiros (1988) occupies two exhibition rooms at the Centro Cultural Correios, in the heart of Rio de Janeiro. This setup not only allows us a generous view of his artistic production over recent years, but also offers a glimpse—whether through cracks or the translucency of his various fabrics, for example—into a significant portion of his current work gathered here.

It should be said upfront that Medeiros is an artist who comes from the field of audiovisual and cinema. Even though it’s unnecessary to cling to boundaries that connect little and foolishly separate often borderline and intersecting artistic fields, the fact is that the artist discovered his vocations and aspirations behind the camera, on film sets and similar environments, where he worked in various roles for many years.

It is from this universe that Medeiros gradually transported his vision as, for example, a cinematographer, to direct looks that are perhaps less abstract than the image formed within a cinematic lens. He is still naturally inspired, not only by the aesthetics of cinema—here omnipresent in materials such as reflectors and light diffusers, iron objects of different sizes and shapes that take on unexpected sculptural contours—but also by its linguistic possibilities.

Thus, from his first exhibition, Medeiros, as an artist with a camera in his head (or at least with a pen in hand to sketch a possible script), draws from facts of his own life, specifically a deeply significant episode for himself, his family, and close ones, from his earliest childhood—a time from which, naturally, he has no memory.

The fateful episode, involving a murder and the power of militias in socially vulnerable territories (in Medeiros’ case, in the city of São Gonçalo, in the state of Rio), emerges as more or less apparent clues, as the artist chooses the second exhibition room as the territory to be occupied by his first series of works.

Orbiting around this personal episode—through clues, vestiges, and excerpts of testimonies collected from legal sources by the artist himself—Medeiros creates a kind of “total work of art” (the so-called Gesamtkunstwerk, referencing the famous German term), imbuing his works with paints, colors, and forms reminiscent of a troubled past-present, as red as blood and as white as the void of memory, along with countless intermediate tones that help connect the loose threads of a scene as emblematic as it is cinematic in its effects and calibers.

In the first room, moving in the reverse direction of the artist’s process, we find his most recent works, where we can observe a practice in constant evolution, despite the obstacles and small miracles that occur in the daily grind of the artist’s studio. If, in some way, the almost-script, half true, half belonging to the imagination (of the artist himself and of many other agents involved in Medeiros’ personal narrative), evokes the boundaries where fiction and truth dance on a tightrope, it is also in Raphael’s works that we are able to detach ourselves from any narrative anchor.

Or, better yet, to surpass, transcend, and transmute it: his works invite us to a moment that takes place in the time of the here and now; they usually capture our reflections, hypnotize our retinas, and deceive our senses with light, colors, and action. However, in this exhibition space, unlike a film set, the action is dictated bilaterally—often in a consensual, passive, or telepathic silence. The works act, we act, the stories remain, the stories escape, the stories also fade. From the starting point once again. More lights, no cameras, even more action.