I'd rather sleep

Solo show @ Kubik Gallery

Porto, Portugal

2025

Raphael Tepedino – Preferi Dormir | Text by Victor Gorgulho

I'd rather sleep. This one writing to you. The artist as well. Everyone who was in this space, even before the exhibition that now remains installed on the walls, floor, and various meanderings of this gallery in the city of Porto, in Portugal. I make a point of specifying the city and country because, you know, when we sleep deeply, we begin to dream, and even to hallucinate, to construct absurdities, to create and inhabit other worlds. So, perhaps, as a way of grounding ourselves in the here and now to which this exhibition invites us, let us seal in stone—or, I mean, in wax, before it melts or cools, petrifies, dries up or comes undone—let us think... errr... together, without blinking our own eyes, without yawning, without looking at the stacked pillows in the very first exhibition room as a way to... delay... drag... challenge, unravel, enter the... dream, sleep... without actually sleeping, think, art, exhibition, sleep, dreaming of sleep, life and dream, life is dream, without me sleeping, or preferring to sleep, without dreaming or sleeping, I preferred, like this, alive, semi-alive, I preferred to sleep............................

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Through a multidisciplinary artistic practice, Raphael Tepedino Rio de Janeiro, 1989) presents "Preferi dormir", his first solo show at Kubikgallery Porto, after having taken part in group exhibitions held by the gallery in cities such as São Paulo, in Brazil. In this exhibition, the artist presents a new series of wall reliefs made through the use and manipulation of wax, as well as a sculpture-installation placed in the first room of the exhibition space.

A material that has been central to his formal research in recent years, wax appears in Tepedinoʼs production as an element that is stretched—and at times stripped—of its conventional, primary uses. If, a priori, wax is employed mainly in utilitarian objects like candles and similar items, we can already, at this point, identify an extraordinary dimension in the possibilities and capabilities that the material holds, as revealed through the artistʼs work.

In this new series of works gathered here, Tepedino presents pieces resulting from over a year of experimentation in his studio in São Paulo. Although wax had already appeared as a chosen material in his artistic practice, here we encounter works that, despite their various formal results and diverse visualities, reveal the current point at which the artistʼs practice stands. In these reliefs—which challenge the two-dimensional plane while flirting with three-dimensionality—we are faced with scenes that are at times entirely abstract, at times infused with a more or less evident figurative desire.

This is not, however, the artistʼs aim in his process: through a mutual listening between himself and the material he so deftly handles, Tepedino seeks only to guide a process that will inevitably lead to unsuspected outcomes. At times close to complete abstraction, punctuated by bursts of color made from the very matter left over after being heated during the process; at other times radically unveiling points, lines, strokes, and involuntary drawings that allow us to see sun-like spheres, scenes akin to landscapes, horizons, and countless other possibilities.

**

The title of the exhibition, "Preferi dormir", was taken by the artist from a passage in the book "Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas" by Machado de Assis. "I preferred to sleep, which is an interim way of dying," says the author in his celebrated 1881 novel. If the theme of sleep appears in Machadoʼs work at the end of the 19th century - a time prior to the explosion of stimuli that would soon come with modernity and its many facets, images, and new forms of cognition and apprehension of the world - in Tepedinoʼs work, sleep appears as a point of inquiry and inflection, present since his earliest pieces.

Here, a pile of pillows rising in the exhibition space, from floor to ceiling - in a quasi-Brancusian manner - points precisely to the role of sleep and dreams in a world where values like acceleration and efficiency seem to govern even the artistic process. "Preferi dormir", the artist seems to reiterate, making Assisʼs words his own.

The work with wax itself, without needing more than a simple mention, reveals Tepedinoʼs desire to work with a material that goes against the grain of a time obsessed with outcomes and endings, often neglecting the means by which they are achieved - or at least, how they have been until now.

His pillows and wax works engage in a transversal dialogue, intentionally neither obvious nor literal. Both, however, when observed and absorbed beyond their initial functions, remind us of a world whose slower rhythm allowed not only a more just and possible enjoyment of our everyday lives but also aligned more closely with the slowed-down, half-awake, half-sleepwalking, half-alive, half-dreaming time typical of artistic practice.

This is a time that, for those who still insist on "preferring to sleep", ends up resembling more closely the time of art, of artistic practice - whether carried out in full wakefulness by the conscious artist, or also realized as the fruit of dreams, desires, and so many other unconscious manifestations that only the shut-off, melted brain, smudged like hot wax melting and soon recomposing itself, can bring into being.