In his autobiography, Jorge Zalszupin recounts that after the house was built in 1962, his wife, Annette, undertook the task of decorating it. That year, the family acquired an abstract painting by Manabu Mabe, in exchange for a sofa. The painting took center stage in the living room of the residence until the end of the 2010s, the final period of the designer's life. Verônica Zalszupin, his eldest daughter, still remembers walking barefoot among Mabe's works when she visited the artist's studio with her father.
This exercise of memory – almost archaeological – is the starting point for The Intimacy of Forms, an exhibition that gives continuity to the Casa Zalszupin programming. The show proposes an expansion of the scope of his incursions into Brazilian modernism and transcultural constellations that shift away from the European axis, thereby resuming investigations into the dimension of intimacy revealed in the architect's organicist residential projects. The memory of Mabe's work inscribed within this space of everyday life thus becomes the historical interface for a tangle of relationships that open up in the exhibition.
In dialogue with the sinuous and cocoon-like forms that characterize Zalszupin's organic constructions, the exhibition brings together drawings, paintings, sculptures and furniture that evoke the spaces and affective memories of the house. On the one hand, Kimi Nii's botanical sculpture and Massao Okinaka's drawings of Japanese flora emphasize the porosity, on the ground floor, between the living areas and the gardens. On the other hand, the paintings by Tikashi Fukushima and Tomie Ohtake reverberate the "absent presence" of Mabe's painting and the post-war Japanese-Diasporic artistic modernity, bringing Fukushima's gesture and lyricism in a set of incandescent paintings, and Ohtake's imprecise geometry along with the informalism of her "blind paintings".
These approximations unfold with the furniture and utilities by designer Claudia Moreira Salles, in part designed for the show, and the paintings by Mika Takahashi, who worked with ETEL to create a wooden screen with the four seasons as its theme, in an intergenerational artistic conversation with Fukushima's work. While Salles' bases, whose materials reflect the surfaces of the house, are home to a ceramic artwork in bloom by Kimi Nii, Takahashi's still lifes inscribe objects from the artist's daily life in the pictorial space, including fragments of the family's butsudan (altar to the ancestors) and a ceramic piece by the centenarian Shoko Suzuki, which belongs to their collection.
Through the notion of intimacy, the exhibition points to the work of memory carried out by the residence-museum. It also emphasizes the dimension of conviviality, typical of the domestic environment, which opens up to distinct relationships between artists, objects and organic forms. Its lens allows us to revisit, in the company of the works gathered here, a prolific cultural moment, in which the parallel trajectories of immigrants from different continents touch each other, against the backdrop of the artistic, architectural and design effervescence in the São Paulo of the years when the place was built.