MEDERIC TURAY
For more than twenty years, Mederic Turay has developed a singular artistic language that combines intellectual depth with extraordinary material richness. Working with pigments, sand, coffee, collage and textured reliefs, he creates powerful compositions that transcend portraiture to become contemporary totems of memory, resilience and humanity.
His artistic philosophy is encapsulated in a simple yet powerful statement: “Resist to Exist.” This recurring theme runs throughout his entire oeuvre. His figures—neither entirely individual nor anonymous—embody resilience, transformation and the enduring strength of the human spirit. Layer by layer, texture after texture, Turay builds works that invite prolonged contemplation, revealing new narratives each time they are experienced.
This new body of work marks a significant evolution in Mederic Turay’s artistic practice, extending his visual language beyond painting into an extraordinary series of sculptural unique ceramics.
Entitled Colours of the Silent Spirits, the collection transforms monumental ceramic vessels into powerful carriers of memory and imagination. Inspired by ancestral legacies, dreams, and imagined mythologies, each sculpture embodies an invisible presence, a silent spirit revealed through expressive colours, symbolic motifs, masks, and organic forms. Balancing African cultural references with a distinctly contemporary aesthetic, these works explore identity, transmission, and transformation. They are not merely sculptural objects, but vessels of stories, preserving traces of worlds that are both remembered and imagined.
ALEX ROCCA
Deeply connected to Afro-Brazilian cultural heritage and Bantu and Yoruba cosmologies, Rocca’s practice draws upon ancestral craftsmanship and forms of material knowledge transmitted across generations. Rather than illustrating specific histories or symbols, he explores how repetitive manual gestures — weaving, stitching, binding, perforating, twisting and assembling — can themselves become acts of continuity and transmission.
Works such as Jeholu and Terra reveal the remarkable breadth of his material vocabulary. The reflective rigidity of brass encounters the organic fragility of raffia, while silk and wool are transformed into sculptural structures suspended between strength and vulnerability, permanence and transformation. Through these contrasts, Rocca moves textile beyond its conventional boundaries, creating objects that evoke ceremonial mantles, protective forms, contemporary totems and fragments of an imagined material archaeology.
Since 2021, Alex Rocca has presented a succession of solo projects at SP-Arte, Brazil’s leading contemporary art fair — Vazios (2021), Pele (2022), Manto (2023), Altar (2024) and Herança (2025). In 2023, he introduced his important Herança series at the Museu Oscar Niemeyer in Curitiba.
Originally trained in Cinema, with postgraduate studies in Scenography and Interior Design, Rocca brings a distinctive understanding of space, structure and composition to his practice. His work participates in the growing international recognition of textile as a major contemporary artistic language, bringing together ancestral knowledge, material innovation and powerful sculptural presence.
