2025 “Acariciar Escamas”

“When stroked in one direction, the touch (of scales) is soft and harmless, but in the opposite direction, if the scales are sharp, the hand catches and gets stuck on the rough surface.

This relationship with touch has always fascinated me. The sensations of softness and friction reinforce how the desire for pleasure and the endurance of it can sometimes blend and be felt simultaneously. The wish of one, to be tender, seeks the fear of the other.

Vallejo uses vibrant, fluorescent colors — the kind scientists apply to lab samples — to overlay reality with a kind of dreamy distortion. These intense, glossy colors define what is seen under the microscope: a fragment of life in neon liquid, perfectly unreal, used to preserve an organism for study. Through this, the artist offers a delicate contradiction to the weight of her message: she uses the gravity of beauty to turn pain inside out.”
Text by the curator of the show, Masina Pinheiro

Photographs by Thiago Almeida