Running 26 to 30 August, Galeria Luis Maluf exhibits "Sinestesia" at the fifth edition of SP-Arte Rotas, held at ARCA in São Paulo under the general curatorship of Bernardo Mosqueira. The project features women artists represented by the gallery—Fernanda Pompermayer, Karola Braga, Giulia Bianchi, Shizue Sakamoto and others—whose practices engage perception through touch, smell, taste and colour. Structured around synesthesia as its conceptual axis, the exhibition proposes an aesthetic experience in which distinct perceptions intersect and deepen the relationship between artwork and viewer, extending beyond its neurological definition.
Fernanda Pompermayer's sculptures activate perception through material. Her ceramic pieces are built from collaged fragments that merge natural and synthetic, figurative and abstract, sacred and profane, in forms evoking minerals, fossils, corals and imaginary artifacts. Drawing on geological processes, Pompermayer layers pigmented clay using the nerikomi technique, creating surfaces of considerable visual complexity where controlled form coexists with collapse risk, prompting an impulse to touch. Her inaugural solo exhibition opens 22 August at Galeria Luis Maluf in Barra Funda, presenting works that synthesize distinct phases of her recent production.
Karola Braga shifts perception toward the realm of fragrance. A scent researcher, she works with fragrances, resins, smoke and aromatic materials to examine what endures and what disperses, activating memory, affect and narrative. Smell, volatile and ephemeral, becomes poetic and political language. In 2024, she presented "Sfumato" at Desert X AlUla in Saudi Arabia: over 11 thousand sticks of myrrh and frankincense activated by wind, conceived as sensorial homage to the ancient Incense Route. In 2025, she won the Experimental category at the Art and Olfaction Awards, the leading international recognition for olfactory art creation, and participated in the 13th Mercosur Biennial. In March 2026, she was named Art Senses Artist of the Year by the Therme Art Program for "Bloom of the Night", research that employs smell as spatial organizer, proposing that aroma structure perception before vision engages. Braga has studied Atlantic Forest scents for several years and will develop this project over the coming six months through the Art Senses program with mentorship from Alexandra Murakami.
In Giulia Bianchi's work, now represented by Luis Maluf, painting evokes sensations connected to body and food: fruits, flowers, seeds and organic forms appear in compositions oscillating between figuration and abstraction, conjuring flavours, scents, textures and temperatures. From September through December 2025, the artist showed a mural project at Sesc Casa Verde centred on Brazilian culinary ingredients, pushing painting beyond purely visual observation and exploring what she calls the invisible dimension of food.
In Shizue Sakamoto's painting, colour becomes a field for contemplation: shaped by her musical training on violin, the artist builds surfaces where rhythm, interval, light and silence structure visual composition. To achieve the gradient effect that characterizes her canvases, she layers up to 50 colours in a single work, creating transitions that continuously reverberate in the viewer. The varying scale of works, from small to large, recalibrates spatial relationship and invites a near-meditative state before the image. Her chromatic research approaches a formal economy close to minimalism, resisting closed interpretive frameworks. Sakamoto has held solo exhibitions at Galeria Kogan Amaro and Galeria Tato, among others.
