The fifth edition of SP-Arte Rotas takes place August 26–30 at ARCA in São Paulo, under the overall curatorship of Bernardo Mosqueira. Galeria Luis Maluf contributes "Sinestesia," a presentation of works by women artists including Fernanda Pompermayer, Karola Braga, Giulia Bianchi, and Shizue Sakamoto, among others, whose practices investigate distinct modes of perception—touch, smell, taste, and color. Synesthesia frames the project's conceptual approach: an aesthetic experience in which different perceptions intersect and deepen the encounter between work and viewer beyond neurological definition. Fernanda Pompermayer creates ceramic sculptures through fragment collage, blending natural and synthetic materials, figuration and abstraction, sacred and profane, into forms evoking minerals, fossils, corals, and imaginary artifacts. Using the nerikomi technique, she layers pigmented clay to produce surfaces of substantial visual complexity where controlled form coexists with risk of collapse, inviting touch and proximity. Her first solo exhibition opens August 22 at Galeria Luis Maluf in Barra Funda, bringing together works spanning recent phases of her practice. Karola Braga redirects perception toward the olfactory realm. Working as a scent researcher with fragrances, resins, smoke, and aromatic materials, she investigates what persists 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 myrrh and frankincense sticks activated by wind, conceived as a sensory ode to the historic Incense Route. In 2025 she won the Experimental category of the Art and Olfaction Awards and participated in the 13a Bienal do Mercosul; in March 2026 she was named Art Senses Artist of the Year by the Therme Art Program for "Bloom of the Night," research using scent as a spatial organizer, proposing smell as a structuring force before vision activates. Braga has long studied Atlantic Forest aromas and will develop this project over the next six months with mentorship from Alexandra Murakami. Giulia Bianchi, now represented by Luis Maluf, creates paintings that trigger bodily and culinary sensation: fruits, flowers, seeds, and organic forms appear in compositions between figuration and abstraction, evoking flavor, aroma, texture, and temperature. From September through December 2025, she showed a mural project at Sesc Casa Verde centered on Brazilian culinary ingredients, extending painting beyond visual observation into what she terms the invisible dimension of food. In Shizue Sakamoto's paintings, color becomes a field for contemplation: informed by her musical training on violin, the artist constructs surfaces where rhythm, interval, light, and silence establish visual composition. To achieve the gradient effect that characterizes her canvases, she layers up to 50 colors in a single work, creating transitions that continuously reverberate for viewers. Varying scales reshape spatial relationship and invite an almost meditative state. Her chromatic research approaches formal economy close to minimalism, resisting closed discursive frames. Sakamoto has held solo exhibitions at Galeria Kogan Amaro and Galeria Tato, among others.
