Algebra

Pinault Collection presents “Algebra”, a major solo exhibition by Brazilian artist Paulo Nazareth on the upper floor of Punta della Dogana. The exhibition project stems from the extensive presence of Nazareth’s works in the Pinault Collection and includes a core of previously unseen works, bringing together over twenty years of artistic practice and transforming the space of the former customs house.

The exhibition curated by Fernanda Brenner derives its title “Algebra” from the Arabic “al-jabr”, the setting of broken bones, evoking algebra’s essence as the art of solving for unknowns and mending what has been fractured. For Paulo Nazareth (born in 1977, Brazil), this becomes a methodology of attending to history’s unhealed fractures through epic walks across the Americas, the Caribbean and the African continent.

A thick line of salt runs through every gallery, marking a threshold between what is visible and what remains submerged. For attentive visitors, this line slowly discloses the geometry of a ghost ship – a tumbeiro, the Portuguese term for the slave ships that crossed the Atlantic. Its architecture of suffering surfaces in fragments throughout the rooms, a spectral presence underlying the entire installation. Salt functions as both metaphor and material agent: healing, corroding, accumulating.

The exhibition presents neither a chronological nor thematic approach but stations in a continuum, a distillation of an ongoing art-life performance. Central among these is Notícias de América from the Pinault Collection, condensing Nazareth’s ten month walk from Brazil to New York. Photographs, texts and worn-out Havaianas trace moments where identity and borders collide, offering a firsthand account of migration as both lived experience and constructed fiction.

When invited to the 2013 Venice Biennale, Nazareth created a parallel event in Veneza, Minas Gerais. For this exhibition, he again activates both sites simultaneously, creating a dialogue across hemispheres: the floating city built on trade meets its landlocked namesake in the Brazilian interior.

Occupying a building where goods were once counted, taxed, and recorded in meticulous ledgers, “Algebra” asks what those accounting systems refused to register. In the gap between measurement and erasure, Nazareth’s exhibition solves for the unnamed, attending to what persists beyond documentation.