Like a mesh of interconnected ideas, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s first exhibition in São Paulo since 2018 invites observation and engagement with the cosmos through works that simultaneously reveal and shift perceptions.
Titled Uma folha translúcida no lugar dos olhos [A Translucent leaf instead of the Eyes], the exhibition presents works in various media, including paintings, sculptures, and holograms, which function as a magnifying glass for the web of connections between living forms, the material, the organic, and the geometric.
Before pursuing the arts, Steegmann Mangrané dreamed of studying biology, and his fascination with nature never really faded. Upon fulfilling his long-held desire to explore the Amazon Rainforest and Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, the artist became interested not only in their biodiversity but also in Indigenous cosmologies and their ways of relating to the natural world. Within these cosmologies, beings and elements are configured through relationships of interdependence in contrast to the Western tradition, which tends to analyze subjects, objects, and phenomena in isolation.
Borrowing the term “living thoughts” from anthropologist Eduardo Kohn – author of How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human__–Steegmann Mangrané gives the title to the exhibition’s central installation. Composed of Brazilian epiphytic plants such as orchids, ferns, bromeliads, and succulents, the work is organized into a suspended structure, with species growing on glass branches. The installation, which emerged after the artist’s visit to the Manaus orchid garden, evokes an experience of closeness to the rainforest, whose density does not allow for great distances but demands shared physicality. The relationship between materialities also features in__Branch with Gold Accents (2026), composed of branches collected by the artist and gold circles. The branches, about five years old, seem to trace a slow calligraphy in space, revealing the formal power of natural structures, while the gold circles evoke cosmic dimensions such as stars or planets – gold, in fact, is a metal of cosmic origin, formed in space, at the heart of supernova explosions and neutron star collisions.
The interplay between nature and geometric forms continues in Systemic Grid 133 (Lina) (2026), a sculpture inspired by Lina Bo Bardi’s crystal easels. Building on the same plinth conceived by the architect, Steegmann Mangrané creates a geometric design using ornamental glass. The work is part of a series in which the artist develops grids from a single cell that, as it multiplies and overlaps, generates progressively complex systems, achieving a certain organic quality. The textured glass intensifies the dialogue between the work, the space, and the viewer: when looking through it and moving, the elements in the background distort, producing new perceptions of the surrounding world. The work highlights how, for the artist, artworks are not only meant to be looked at but rather function as tools for viewing the world in a new way.
This perceptual dimension reappears in the sculptures of the _Phasmides___series (2026). Based on drawings that do not directly correspond to existing forms but stimulate the imagination, the sculptures trigger pareidolia – a phenomenon in which the brain interprets ambiguous visual stimuli as familiar forms – without, however, leading to a definitive conclusion. The works thus place the viewer in a realm of uncertainty. For Steegmann Mangrané, this state of suspension is one of the powers of art: to make room for doubt and for the emergence of unexpected associations beyond words.
The phenomenological approach – to engage with the work not only through one’s eyes but also one’s entire body – links Steegmann Mangrané to Neo-Concrete artists such as Lygia Pape, Lygia Clark, and Hélio Oiticica. The artist sees in this movement an approach in which the sensory becomes an entryway to aesthetic experience, an experience with political and emancipatory implications. A series of red crystal holograms exemplifies this phenomenon. The pieces invite the viewer to move around them, gradually revealing geometric and plant-like structures, occasionally inhabited by stick insects and leaf insects. In the hologram, the image never appears in a fixed form; it depends on the observer’s movement to take shape.
Transparency once again plays a central role in the new paintings of the series Translucent Leaves (2026). In these works, thin glazes of paint overlay drawings of leaves distributed across the canvas’s surface, vanishing them to varying degrees. The act of painting over these fragments of nature creates the sensation of observing something behind a translucent layer, allowing only glimpses. The result is a subtle interplay between depth, perception, and the shifting gaze.
Throughout the exhibition, Steegmann Mangrané constructs a field of relationships in which nature, geometry, and perception continually intertwine. His works do not present themselves as isolated objects, but as devices that activate the viewer’s experience of space and the body. Amid transparencies, suspensions, and transformations, the artist proposes a form of expanded attention – a way of perceiving the world as a living web of connections in constant, reciprocal transformation.
Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s research is composed of subtle yet crude experiments that question the relationship between language and the world. Although primarily conceptual, his installations engage with the imagination of the spectator and exhibit a strong concern with the existence of everything we see, but especially on everything that we do not see.
Intellectually rigorous, politically active, and highly conceptual, the programme of contemporary art gallery Mendes Wood DM places an emphasis on critical conversation, working to embrace the individuality of each artist while also supporting the discovery of intersections between practices that might initially seem disparate.
