LUMIÈRE Contemporary Art Gallery is pleased to announce the solo exhibition Marcelo Daldoce: Plants, on view from October 11 through November 11, 2024. This is Daldoce’s first solo presentation at the gallery and will feature recent drawings and prints.
Marcelo Daldoce’s works arise from his observational encounters with plants both inside and outside his studio, expressed through two distinct bodies of work: Observational and Tactile.
The Observational showcases perspectival academic watercolors and line drawings of live tropical houseplants. These delicate, foreign specimens are rooted in water, replicating life and adapting to indoor conditions. Daldoce captures their softness and the surrounding negative space, exploring the interplay between fragility and resilience. The process engages retinal senses—seeing, internalizing, and interpreting.
The Tactile, in contrast, features non-perspectival experimental works created from dead, native outdoor plants—often regarded as weeds that thrive in harsh environments. Collected from the streets, these plants are dried and flattened in a print press to produce monotypes. Each piece reflects the tenacity of these weeds as they emerge from crevices and conquer concrete spaces, illustrating a formal abstraction that speaks to their resilience. The process is metaphorically linked to primal sensory experiences, such as touching, smelling, and feeling textures, and reflects the interactions between plants and beasts, such as bees and pollen.
As a Brazilian immigrant in the USA, Daldoce finds personal meaning in his work, symbolizing a sense of belonging and rooting in new environments. Following the loss of his father and the birth of his daughter just two days later in 2021, his work has explored themes of duality—softness and strength, life and death.
Marcelo Daldoce is a Brazilian artist living and working in Philadelphia, PA. In 2016, he received his MFA from the New York Academy of Art and has earned residencies at the Leipzig International Art Program in Germany and the Eric Fischl Residency in Maryland. Daldoce has exhibited in museums in Austria and Brazil, as well as at art fairs and in private collections. His work has also been featured in group exhibits in Brazil, New York City, Sotheby’s, and many other galleries around the world, as well as on the covers of various art publications and mainstream magazines like There and GQ. Daldoce was awarded the Elizabeth Greenshields Grant in 2017 and 2019.
