Among Alan Fontes's many interests, a predominant motif in his paintings and installations, his penchant for disasters stands out. Disasters large and small, domestic, like the one he staged in the Pampulha Museum exhibition hall, or natural, like storms and typhoons, a considerable portion of which are man-made, the result of interventions that consecrate us as the most destructive beings on the planet. Aware of this problem—an obvious fact that, judging by the present, the future will not equate with stability—Alan, anchored in the idea of ​​the house as a body, subtly transforms the representation of architecture into a form of portraiture.

​

While he offers us objective data about the houses depicted—family homes, common in middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhoods of any Brazilian city—taken from photographs found in magazines and websites, his paintings, on the other hand, resemble portraits. Alan Fontes's houses have their strangeness turned upside down and exposed. The torn-down walls lay bare the domestic intimacy, presenting with rawness and laceration a typical example of the cozy atmosphere with which we upholster our daily lives.

​

For this exhibition, the artist turns to Juscelino Kubitschek's house, situated on the banks of Pampulha Lagoon. Like the entire complex, it was a bold initiative by the then-mayor, the first major commission from Oscar Niemeyer. It is not just a house, but a symbol; the formal structural solution, composed of two perpendicular trapezoidal volumes, clad in white, typically modern, heralds an optimistic Brazil, a country that was then making its future present. A belief that the artist dismantles by contrasting the clear image of the house with a stormy, gloomy sky; with the furniture, covered in soft, neutral colors like a dreamed-of utopia, dragged by the portable winds of the fans; like the empty frames and photographs thrown on the floor, icons absent or worn by time.