Category: Exhibitions

In 2024, Rod RAS took part in the 3rd Festival Vórtice at Vórtice Cultural, São Paulo — the edition in which he received the Best Artist award, the first recognition recorded in his CV.

The recognition crowns a year of intense participation in group shows — six in total in 2024. At the festival, his embroidered production in metallic threads — then centered on the Santos series and the Shibari & Flowers self-portraits — found a context attuned to themes of body, desire and difference. They are works in which the slowness of embroidery meets the urgency of the themes, and the award broadened the circulation of a production now held in private collections across 20 countries.

Group exhibition at Vórtice Cultural, São Paulo/SP, 2024.

The first edition of Falo de Erotismo took place in 2024 at Vórtice Cultural, São Paulo, marking Rod RAS’s debut in a project he would join in every edition held through 2025, in a year that added up to six group shows in his CV, between São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

Dedicated to eroticism, the show offered a precise space for the artist’s research, which uses freehand embroidery to represent the male body, desire and vulnerability — themes running through series such as Santos and Shibari & Flowers and across his entire production, made of layers of thread, of time and of memory, in which the manual meets the autobiographical and the intimate.

Group exhibition at Vórtice Cultural, São Paulo/SP, 2024.

In 2024, Rod RAS also joined Ménage 3, a group exhibition at Vórtice Cultural, São Paulo — one of several of the artist’s projects at the venue that year, when Vórtice hosted three of his six exhibition participations.

The title suggests encounters and relationships outside the norm, a field in which Rod RAS’s work moves naturally: gay desire, the multiplicity of the body and queer imagery are the raw material of his embroidery, from Minotauro de Pirenópolis to the Santos series, then in production. They are embroideries that join the delicacy of technique to the force of the subjects, in a production that was born from the self-portrait and expanded into mythical figures and the Brazilian landscape.

Group exhibition at Vórtice Cultural, São Paulo/SP, 2024.

In 2023, Rod RAS took part in Queereres, a group exhibition at Paradoxo Casa Atelier, Rio de Janeiro — his first recorded participation at the venue, to which he would return in 2026 for the Sauna Gay Satanista show.

The year 2023 corresponds, in the artist’s production, to works from the Minotauro de Pirenópolis and Shibari & Flowers series — embroideries in which myth, body and desire intertwine on the canvas, made in metallic and cotton threads. A show gathered under a name that plays on the word “queer” is a natural environment for research rooted in the experience of a gay man. The participations of that year inaugurated a circulation that has not stopped since.

Group exhibition at Paradoxo Casa Atelier, Rio de Janeiro/RJ, 2023.

In 2023, Rod RAS joined Muito Além da Parada, a group exhibition at Objectos do Olhar, São Paulo — his only exhibition recorded in the city that year, within a period that marked his debut in group shows, with three participations in total.

The title evokes the LGBT pride parade and suggests an art that goes beyond the street’s one-off celebration: it meets a research such as Rod RAS’s, for whom identity affirmation is continuous work — embroidery stitches on guilt, stigma and acceptance, not only festivity, sewn into the durability of thread. It is also in this register that his self-portrait gains political strength — not as a flag, but as a presence.

Group exhibition at Objectos do Olhar, São Paulo/SP, 2023.

Erotic, at OLugar Arte Contemporânea, Rio de Janeiro, was, in 2023, Rod RAS’s first recorded participation in a group exhibition — the starting point of a CV that, three years later, already totals eighteen shows across three Brazilian states.

The title already indicated the territory: eroticism as a legitimate theme of art. For an artist who embroiders his own unclothed body and desire between men, the show was a place of early inscription — his research, still centered on Shibari & Flowers and Minotauro de Pirenópolis and made in metallic and cotton threads on canvas, already carried the axes that define it to this day: body, desire, guilt and the search for acceptance.

Group exhibition at OLugar Arte Contemporânea, Rio de Janeiro/RJ, 2023.