The ongoing series Camuflada [Camouflage] extends Márcia Falcão's longstanding exploration of the female body as a site of presence and visibility. While her paintings have consistently insisted on bringing historically marginalized bodies into view, this new series introduces a tension between visibility and concealment, asking how exposure might coexist with protection in a climate of escalating violence against women. Rather than withdrawing these figures from view, Falcão complicates their legibility through stark contrasts of light and shadow, creating anatomies that resist immediate recognition and slow the viewer's gaze.
The series further develops Falcão's engagement with the material language of painting. A single earth pigment serves as the chromatic axis of the series, extending across violets, blues, shadows, and areas of light, so that the entire palette is derived from a common chromatic source. The compositions likewise resist stability: bodies appear displaced, fragmented, or only partially revealed, generating a persistent sense of tension and visual unease. Color, light, drawing, and composition thus become inseparable from the conceptual questions that structure the series.
The title alludes in part to the "dazzle camouflage" developed by the British Navy during the First World War, whose fractured geometric patterns were designed not to hide ships but to confuse the perception of their position and movement. A similar visual ambiguity unfolds in these paintings, where figure, light, and background continually dissolve into one another, making it difficult to determine where the body begins or ends, or whether it emerges from or recedes into the pictorial field.