The Hours of Halt — Mariana Leme

The Hours of Halt
Nina Horikawa’s solo exhibition at ORA gallery
São Paulo, aug.-sept., 2026

Nina Horikawa: The Hours of Halt

Suspended or resting on metallic structures, paintings on transparent fabrics fill the space. The brushstrokes reveal the gestural, reiterated, and cumulative quality of the artist’s work. In the images, there is a woman’s face with half-closed eyes, dogs baring their teeth, huge intertwined hands. Another woman stretches a thread; there are knots and ribbon bows. A bird sticks its beak into a person’s mouth, who imitates its shape with their arm and hand, creating an unusual shadow theater: a real simulacrum of reality.

In the hours of halt, when everyday, semi-automatic tasks are suspended, Nina Horikawa invites us to estrangement. It is necessary to take a step back and distrust everything that presents itself in its completeness, whether a scene, a painting, or a statement. After all, almost nothing is exactly what it seems.

The transparency of the voile — literally, a veil — causes the paintings to be permeated by the elements that surround them: the concrete of the back wall, the room’s pillars, the floor, the other paintings. Above all, they become contaminated by the bodies of the people walking by, superimposing themselves onto the images and destabilizing what would ideally be cohesive and autonomous; whole.

The veil that serves as the support for Horikawa’s works is not innocent. Metaphorically, its presence defines and organizes a broken society, in which the supremacy of a small “white” fraction of humanity depends on the convenience of veiling reality, much in the way the African American intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois established over a century ago. He recalls the day when, during an exchange of visiting cards among children at school, his was refused:

Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows.[1]

By veiling the exhibition space, Horikawa creates an atmosphere that rejects the transparency of the world, in the Renaissance sense of the term. At the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries, the methods of linear perspective caused man — European, adult, male, endowed with vision — to position himself “at the center of all things,” to quote the words of Florentine art historian Cristina Acidini.

The author adds that this “norm for the representation of space that would guide the arts would also inspire great progress in cartography, influencing the methods of perceiving and measuring the Earth, and in fact opening the era of the great voyages of exploration and arrival in new lands.”[2] Herein lies the illusion of transparency and completeness of the history narrated for centuries, including through painting: the humanist subject, by positioning himself as the pivot of the world, would be “inspired” to find new lands on his “great voyages” — excluding, or veiling, all the violence contained in this process, still ongoing.

But Horikawa does not allow this illusion to happen. The viewer of the paintings is implicated in the physical space, in a play of drapery that covers and uncovers immediate reality — including the images themselves — preventing an overall view. It is as if the artist materialized the veil that sustains the neatly finished history of the modern hero, fragmenting it into open, slightly incoherent, inconclusive parts. The loose brushstrokes and large unpainted areas reinforce the sense of openness, both of the depicted scenes and of the possibilities that present themselves in moments of pause, in the hours of halt.

In addition to the works on voile, the artist presents a development of the Spoken-unspoken series, begun four years ago. It is an unstable set formed by small 20 × 20 cm paintings, periodically added or subtracted. The images resemble fragments of a larger scene: there are lit candles on a cake, bruised fingers around red nail polish, a dog’s tail, a human throat, someone sleeping, someone holding a wedding band or a souvenir, among many other things. Once again, the sense of openness provoked by the artworks: the “story” only exists as a possibility and a promise, according to the desire of the viewer.

The hours of halt — which are those of rest, suspension, and pause — borrows a line from the Brazilian poet Eunice Arruda, which reads:

yes
there are
the hours of halt

When the knives
are sharped[3]

Whether the knives are sharpened with the intention of preparing food or committing a crime is something that is also left open. What is essential, however, is that as the illusion of the linearity of time is suspended, an opening emerges for creation — of an artwork, certainly, but also of new confabulations and stories.

^{Photos: Julia Thompson}
Notes
[1] DU BOIS, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co.,1903.
[2] ACIDINI, Cristina. “Florença”. In Mestres do Renascimento. São Paulo: Base7/Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, 2013, p. 19 (exhibition catalogue). Available at: https://static.ccbb.com.br/site- prod/2021/07/Renascimento.pdf.
[3] ARRUDA, Eunice. “Observando - I”. In Poesia reunida. São Paulo: Pantemporâneo, 2012, p. 106. Originally published in Os momentos. São Paulo: Nobel, 1981.