Between folds, supports, twists and counter-shapes, Edu Monteiro's sculptures investigate the threshold at which heavy and dense matter, a metaphor for being itself, transfigures and is reborn precious and vivid. As in the tradition of ancient blacksmiths and alchemy, the return to the primordial darkness is inscribed in a symbolic and magical register of searching for refinement and revolution – lead transformed into gold. In the unprecedented series Saturno e o Sol, Monteiro brings opposites together: the somber devouring of Time and the vital force of light. With lead sheets supported on time-worn wooden beams and projected falling into space, he draws a soft and heavy geometry, punctuated by small gold triangles. The shine stresses these suspended materials — between support and fall — destabilizing their gravity. 

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Traced in negative spaces, in the void, or through overlaps of metal onto wood, recurring triangulations evoke a long-lasting temporal flow that, finally, would lead to the primordial return. Simple folds – as in Terra, with the square sheet of lead supported diagonally forming a large triangle, or in Dobra do Tempo, a crossed support that shifts the two faces into new angles – point to the reunion with the original mother, to the return of matter to its primitive state, and to the moment when, from this return, a new form can be reborn. 

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These sculptures are tensioned by “Tchou pou tèt” [upside down], a work carried out during Edu Monteiro's return to Martinique, within the scope of the Vulcões e Territórios residency. A Caribbean island from which fundamental voices of anti-colonial thought emerge — Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Édouard Glissant —, Martinique remains tied to France by a neocolonial structure that, under the guise of belonging, preserves deep economic, social and symbolic asymmetries. There, the artist transforms an abandoned container in the woods into a camera obscura: he captures the inverted landscape in a painting, returns to it an image turned against the order of the world and inscribes, on the reverse side, in Martinican, the sentence: “France's economic and political exploitation of Martinique must collapse”. 

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This inversion of the landscape dialogues with previous research in which body and forest are symbolically opposed to the forms of dominance inscribed in the container. In Florestania (2022-2025), following the thought of Ailton Krenak, the artist internalizes the discovery of a grammar of the forest by cultivating and observing plants in the backyard of his studio in Santa Teresa and producing self-portraits in which plant fragments become part of his body. This sense of primary reintegration — becoming forest as a reconstruction of a revolutionary subjectivity — returns in Dematê 1 and 2, a photographic diptych in which, on one side, plants cover the artist's face and, on the other, invade the container, a symbol of Martinique's economic domination. 

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Since his research on Ladja, Martinique's combat dance, Monteiro has investigated sculptural objects initially conceived for the photographic act: forms that inscribe body tension into the image — force and counterforce — and, at the same time, symbolically map the social game relived in the fight itself. In Sono do Beija-flor, however, the sculptural act achieves autonomy. Between corporeality, image and symbol, these works probe the obscure and ambivalent zone between fall and movement, matter and rebirth, as an inquiry into being itself. The hummingbird — or colibri, symbol of the Ladja — is a fast bird, with iridescent plumage, whose sleep leads it to torpor: a state of latency between life and death, in which it sustains itself on a branch until awakening, slowly, every day. Thus, between lead and gold, fall and suspension, torpor and awakening, Edu Monteiro turns sculpture into a field of transmutation: not the fixed form of a body, but the unstable moment in which matter seems about to be reborn.