FEMALUMA

Cascais | Rio de Janeiro
Director | Pedro Nazar

FEMALUMA was founded by Pedro and Carolina Nazar after more than a decade of collecting and engagement with contemporary art. With spaces in Cascais and Rio de Janeiro, the gallery creates an ongoing dialogue between Europe and Brazil. Focused primarily on the primary market, FEMALUMA works with emerging and established artists, supporting their practices through exhibitions, art fairs, publications, and relationships with collectors, curators, and institutions. The gallery is also active in the secondary market, sourcing and placing significant works. Its program is not defined by geography, generation, or medium, but by dialogues across cultures, periods, and artistic perspectives.

www.femaluma.com

CURATORIAL VISION

This presentation brings together a selection of recent works by Luca Benites that explore the relationship between geometry, perception and time. Through circles, triangles, spirals, mirrored planes and polished metallic surfaces, the artist constructs a visual language in which form is never static, but continuously transformed by light, reflection and the movement of the viewer. Rather than treating geometry as a rational or self-contained system, Benites approaches it as a temporal experience. His works reveal themselves gradually, changing according to the viewer's position, the surrounding light and the passing of time. Reflection becomes both material and metaphor, dissolving the boundary between object, space and observer. Working across sculpture, wall relief and modular constructions, Benites revisits the legacy of Constructivism and Concrete Art while shifting their emphasis from permanence and order to impermanence, perception and duration. Precision gives way to instability; fixed compositions become experiences that unfold in time. The stand is conceived as a single installation where each work contributes to a broader dialogue about transformation. Polished surfaces capture fragments of the surrounding architecture, visitors and light, making every encounter unique and impossible to repeat. The works exist not as immutable objects, but as events that continuously renegotiate their form through the passing of time. At the heart of Benites' practice lies the understanding that time is not simply something measured, but something perceived. His sculptures invite the viewer to slow down, to move, and to recognize that seeing is itself a temporal act.

BIO

Luca Benites (Brasília, 1981) is an artist and architect based in São Paulo, working across Europe, Latin America, and the United States. His practice explores the relationship between architecture, materiality, time, memory, and transformation. Benites began painting in Montevideo in 1998 under Uruguayan artist Ignacio Iturria. He studied architecture at Universidad ORT Uruguay and later completed a Master’s in Architecture at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and a Master’s in Fine Arts at the Universitat de Barcelona. For nearly two decades, his work examined urban growth, architecture, and the changing structures of contemporary cities. In 2016, Benites radically redirected his practice through FOGO, a project in which he burned 298 works produced over the previous years. The action, documented in Ebnit, Austria, marked a deliberate rupture with his earlier production. Using the resulting ashes, he developed a new body of work between 2017 and 2019, including hourglasses, paintings, and installations addressing time, value, loss, and regeneration. Benites has participated in more than 100 exhibitions internationally, including presentations in São Paulo, Miami, Shanghai, Copenhagen, Lisbon, Madrid, Barcelona, Buenos Aires, and Montevideo. His work has been exhibited alongside artists including Tony Cragg, Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, Amilcar de Castro, Abraham Palatnik, Franz Weissmann, and Pablo Atchugarry. His work is held in institutional and private collections including MAC Niterói, MACA, Fundación Pablo Atchugarry, Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Sorocaba, and Grupo Votorantim.