François Ghebaly New York is proud to present Seven Keys, an exhibition of new paintings by São Paulo-based artist Beatrice Arraes.

Beatrice Arraes conceals as much as she clarifies in her enigmatic oil works on canvas. A trained dancer and longtime admirer of artists and writers like Clarice Lispector, Pina Bausch, Eleonore Koch, and Lygia Fagundes Telles, Arraes looks to translate psychological states into heady, inscrutable pictures that both portray and protect the mysteries of life. Her newest exhibition, Seven Keys, takes its title from a proverbial Portuguese expression to describe the lengths one might go to secure something very important—i.e. to hide behind “seven locks and keys.” Excavatory and atavistic, Arraes’ images incorporate detailed scenography, observational painting, and a rich, dusken palette to explore ideas of displacement and desire.

Set throughout the New York gallery space, the paintings that comprise Seven Keys cycle through a handful of echoic, sometimes directly repeated subject matters. Contorted fruit peels, slips of paper, obscure boardgame pieces, and earthen mounds populate each of Arraes’ individual dramas. In Armadilha, patterned boards, ribbon, and a pile of vivid red-orange seeds comprise a strange intimist still-life, with its elements arranged as though characters in a scenario. And in De cantinho, a glimpse of Bauschian choreography appears through the doorway at the end of a dark corridor. Though Arraes’ images are neither narrativistic nor explicitly interrelated, her theatrical approach to exhibition-making tempts the thought that certain paintings might act as ciphers for a deeper mystery or intent.

The works Boca teatral, Fonte, and Orquestra each feature images of volcanoes and calderas, recurring motifs for Arraes. Largely absent in the geology of the Brazilian subcontinent, volcanoes offer for Arraes an apt metaphor for psychological and energetic phenomena that are metamorphic, aggregating, and simultaneously hidden or withheld. In this vein, Seven Keys looks to conjure the sense of those most vital, desirous things that cannot be easily seen or transacted.

Beatrice Arraes holds a bachelor’s degree from the Universidade Federal do Ceará in Fortaleza, Brazil, and also studied Fine Arts at the Universidad de Salamanca in Spain. Recent solo exhibitions include PEANA, Mexico City; Sea View, Los Angeles; and Galeria Leonardo Leal, Fortaleza. Selected group exhibitions include Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh; MAMA Projects, New York; Pinacoteca do Ceará, Fortaleza; Almeida & Dale, São Paulo; Perrotin, Paris; Société, Berlin; Millan, São Paulo; Casa Gabriel, São Paulo; and Lima Galeria, São Luis. Her work is held in the collection of the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro.