Barracas e Fachadas do Nordeste, an exhibition presented by Galatea in partnership with Nara Roesler, brings together five artists from different generations who, through distinct languages and territorial experiences, act as sensitive cataloguers of these transforming landscapes. Adenor Gondim (1950, Bahia), Fábio Miguez (1962, São Paulo), Mari Ra (1996, São Paulo), Montez Magno (1934–2023, Pernambuco), and Zé di Cabeça (1974, Bahia) approach the vernacular architectures of Brazil’s Northeast — urban façades, ornamental parapets, and the ephemeral structures of market and festival stalls — not merely as visual motifs, but as fields of memory, experience, and symbolic construction.
The exhibition is structured into two small sections, one dedicated to façades and the other to stalls. In the first, the set of images is presented in dialogue with the work of Zé di Cabeça, who transforms records of parapets from Salvador’s railway suburb into drawings, tiles, and paintings. In her Platibandas painting series, Mari Ra identifies affinities between the geometries found in houses in Recife and Olinda and those present in São Paulo’s East Zone, revealing visual connections shaped by Northeastern migration. Finally, Fábio Miguez produced a series of paintings especially for the exhibition, in which he investigates the architectural variations of Salvador’s façades based on records and his experience in the city during a period of research and immersion.