Passinho: 2024 – present

Márcia Falcão's Passinho series (2024–present) extends her investigation into movement while posing a more specific painterly question: how might the material qualities of paint and gestural hatching generate rhythm? She finds her answer in passinho, a contemporary dance style closely associated with Funk Carioca, or Baile Funk. Originating in Rio de Janeiro's favelas in the early 2000s, passinho has gained international recognition, embodying virtuosic bodily control, social resilience, and cultural self-assertion. While Falcão's other recent bodies of work dispense with or complicate traditional perspectival devices in favor of close-cropped, fluid compositions, the Passinho paintings employ a defined horizon line and smaller figures to evoke spare landscapes. In several works, full-figured Black women are refracted above and below the horizon line, lending the compositions a sense of temporal depth reinforced by titles such as Passinho: Memória Radical [Passinho: Radical Memory] and Passinho ancestral. Across the series, a recurring figure—a woman balancing one child on her hip while another clings to her opposite leg—serves as what Falcão describes as a “contemporary Madonna.” Often facing an opposing woman as though engaged in a dance battle, she conveys maternal endurance, ancestral continuity, and cultural resilience.