Oscar Murillo presents A Song to a Tearful Garden (2025), a site-specific, collective painting in Ibirapuera Park. Visitors to the Bienal will encounter curved scaf-folding structures positioned on either side of the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, each with a wall of artist canvas and art materials, allowing the public to create a series of large-scale paintings. Every week the public’s marks will create an index of painted layers providing a place of reflection against a backdrop of cosmopolitan energy from the surrounding city. Situated within this duality of nature and urban modernity the canvases bear witness to the idea of darkness haunting a harmonious surface. This is a frequent concern in Murillo’s work, often alluding to the biography of Claude Monet and his famous Water Lilies (1920-1926), created in spite of the artist’s debilitating cataracts and loss
of vision. In Ibirapuera Park, these collaborative canvases are an ode to the surrounding environment: a song to a tearful garden.
Ahead of the installation, Murillo invited friends, family, and members of the public to form the painting’s base layer in a series of drawing sessions held around the world. Canvas will travel to São Paulo from across the Atlantic, throughout Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean in a celebration of collective spirit anchored by the exercise of mark-making, a process Murillo refers to as social mapping. The resulting canvases with their accumulated marks become an embodiment of the passage of time, the flow of people, and the geographical markers that connect us. The structures themselves draw on the power of the collective in communal spaces, using gesture, repetition, and the flooding of marks to activate viewers and participants alike.
These ideas of collective energy are mirrored in the artist’s Mesmerizing Beauty (2025) installation, presented inside the Pavilion. The work comprises a series of oil-painted seascapes on cardboard, with traces of their former life as traded goods visible beneath Murillo’s gestural marks. Propped up by vertical lengths of wood and secured to disposable plastic chairs, the installation manifests a sense of dissonance echoing the poetic aspirations of the public participation unfolding outside. Murillo will partner with the Bienal’s education team, inviting members from various cultural and educational institutions to contribute to this collective artwork – embracing the Bienal’s curatorial concept of reflecting on humanity, claiming space, and fostering encounters.
