Zé Tepedino often says that when objects and materials lose their practical function, they gain a poetic one. It isn’t a theory he arrived at intellectually. It’s something he recognized through experience.
“Children do this all the time,” he says. A stick becomes a sword. A cardboard box becomes a house. “But as we grow older, we need to look serious, and the world hardens us.”
Even though he has a twin brother, Tepedino preferred to play alone. He would build his own worlds in the backyard of his childhood home. That sensation returned years later, when he began photographing with film as a teenager. He became fascinated by accidents in the darkroom, unexpected marks, distortions, and technical “mistakes” that transformed the image.
“I realized the practical function of photography is to document,” he explains. “Everything that overflowed from that was poetry. It was very exciting. I felt like I was creating a new world.”
That was the moment he felt he was stepping into art.
Today, Tepedino is drawn to objects that exist in what he calls a “place of the margins.”
“They’re between one thing and another,” he says. “And that makes them open to transformation, like when a child finds a stick and calls it a sword.”
He finds these materials in the street, in flea markets, in the trash, or abandoned in forgotten corners of the city, objects saturated with time and memory. He is also interested in banal, repetitive things that exist everywhere but have somehow fallen out of circulation.
“They’re the physical evidence of a place’s culture,” he says. “Like photographs, but with other material qualities.”
In the exhibition, tarps, wooden hangers, beer bottles, landscape paintings, and old books appear as fragments of everyday life, documents of habits and time.
His collecting process moves between chance and intention.
“Both things happen,” he says. “Sometimes a material appears in a unique encounter. Other times I start paying attention, and I go looking for more.”
He describes a work made from brown paper sheets used in card games. Every Sunday, on his way to the beach, he noticed tables wrapped in kraft paper covered with handwritten scores. He began collecting them, then created a ritual: every Sunday morning, he would pass by the square to gather new ones.
In other cases, the gesture is instinctive. When a glass breaks, he collects the shards and wraps them in that day’s newspaper. He gathers abandoned Havaianas flip-flops from the streets of Rio.
Over time, these fragments accumulate, and once reorganized, they begin to tell a different story.
Fabric, wood, and paper are materials he returns to constantly. They’re simple, common, easy to transform. But for him, the crucial moment isn’t the choice of material. It’s the moment the object loses its practical function.
His process is rarely planned.
“I never plan,” he says. “Things appear while I’m making. But to improvise, you need discipline.”
Whenever he tries to plan too carefully, the plan becomes only a starting point, one gesture leading to another.
He describes materials as oracles.
“They point in a direction. After a while, the work starts walking on its own. One form suggests another. One color invites the next.”
For Tepedino, the studio is not a closed room. It’s the city itself.
“I think living is being in the studio,” he says. He moves mostly by public transportation, observing people, objects, and spaces. Buses, street markets, Carnival, and what he calls “neglected” places are especially fertile.
“When I find a good reason, I propose an action or a work for those situations.”
Bringing his work from Rio to Los Angeles is also an experiment.
“I’m curious to find out what changes,” he says.
He sees parallels between Rio and California, cosmopolitan places shaped by beach culture. Having lived in California at seventeen, an experience he calls transformative, he carries that memory within him. It surfaces naturally in his work.
The film in the exhibition was not initially meant to be an artwork. He shot it during Rio’s street Carnival with a small handheld camera, capturing spontaneous moments without intimidating people.
“Video gives a more complete experience,” he says. “Image in motion, with sound.”
He wanted to capture the chaotic, fantastic, playful energy of Carnival, the time of year when people dress up in the morning, take over the streets, meet friends, drink, and celebrate.
“For me, Carnival is a kind of magical realism.”
Among his references are filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho, poet Manoel de Barros, the Brazilian Neo-Concretists, and artists like Bispo do Rosário, Fernanda Gomes, Jac Leirner, Francis Alÿs, and Louise Bourgeois.
But his own practice is less about invention than about rearrangement.
“It’s about offering a new look at things we already know,” he says. “When I reorganize something, it creates curiosity and doubt. And that expands our perception.”
At its core, his work returns to the solitary child building worlds in the backyard. Only now, the entire city becomes the playground, and what once served a practical purpose is finally free to serve poetry.
The title of the exhibition carries, for him, a sense of secrecy and closeness.
“It has something of a secret,” he says, “but also a power to bring people closer. Like a stitch, a nail, or glue. It’s a tool for connection.”
He speaks about intuitive encounters, between materials, between people, between trajectories that cross almost magically. The exhibition, he says, celebrates these meetings. Carnival, with its collective energy, becomes part of that logic.
Because ESPASSO and Ysasi Gallery are such different spaces, he developed two distinct approaches. At the gallery, a more neutral environment, works will be added and rearranged over time. At ESPASSO, where furniture is strongly present, he plans to incorporate and reorganize it, creating new conversations between furniture, sculptures, wall works, and film.
