Fleeting landscapes of the natural world and the body in motion are currently tucked away on a dead-end street in an industrial area of Downtown Los Angeles. In three solo exhibitions at Night Gallery, Clare Woods reinterprets the still-life genre through oil on aluminum, Coco Young shows pastel-toned, oil-on-linen pastoral scenes, and Márcia Falcão presents curvaceous figures on canvas and paper.
Early in her career, Márcia Falcão depicted the landscape of her hometown, Rio de Janeiro, where she still lives and works. Now, across her canvases, the body becomes its own kind of terrain, and vice versa. For her first solo exhibition with Night Gallery, featuring works from her Yoga, Capoeira, and Monumentais series (2022–ongoing), the artist’s mostly brown and red-toned paintings and sketches all feature large nude women in motion. In these various poses, the bodies become their own landscapes.
In “A Ponte” (2024), which translates to “The Bridge,” a larger-than-life brown nude body rendered in oil and oil stick on canvas is draped over a cracked landmass, becoming the literal bridge between the two broken pieces of land. Other nude curvaceous female brown bodies make up the base of the mass. Pressed against one another, violated and resilient, they are a nod to generational resistance to colonialism. The figures in Falcão’s paintings gradually reveal their shapes and colors, sometimes swallowed by the landscape, sometimes becoming it.
“Streetdance” (2024), from her Capoeira series, features a nude female body in charcoal and oil, as large as the canvas itself. She is temporarily suspended in the air as she practices the Afro-Brazilian martial art dance of Capoeira. Here, the body is a site of joy, free to exist happily in motion without physical or societal restraint.
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