In Costumes by God, the male and female bodies are revealed, not as a neutral, but as desirable, erotic, and sometimes pornographic bodies. The politics of nudity, the shifting of power between the one looking and the one been looked at, the beauty, the fantasies, and sometimes just the suggestion of nudity will play with the audience perspective. From their Brazilian roots, Andrea and Rosane find inspiration on Carnaval. The parallel universe where chaos, seduction, improvisation and overall eroticism is allowed. The permissiveness and promiscuity, the transgressions of social rules, the inflamed athmosphere, is the basis for those who give themselves to the excesses. During Carnaval, as in Costumes by god, we are looking for the encounter of aesthetic, manifestation and impulse (the artistic, the ideologic , and the ritualistic).

The erotic body is vulnerable; is a facade; is honest despite itself; it is hard-edged and violent, but it is also invitingly luminous. It keeps reminding us that it is a source of life and an undeniable document of erosion; and it is both loved and despised for its elemental sexuality. In this new work, the artists will engage in the concept of nudity that keeps reinventing itself through time through changes of cultural boundaries in terms of gender; religion beliefs; the media and marketing; the movies; the books; the paintings; and the transformation of society as a whole that keeps transforming nudity from sin to naturalism, from perversion to healthy pleasure and back again, in an ongoing and never ending shifting cycle.

ChameckiLerner’s meticulous compositional skills tie the crude and grotesque to the religious utility of this pre-Lenten orgy: souls abjecting themselves before their god. Each wracking position of the body serves as a purification, a whiplash memento more of piety and transcendence. Chris Dohse, New York Press