The Kiss on the Asphalt

FLEXA and Tropigalpão are pleased to present The Kiss on the Asphalt, a short-term exhibition organized in partnership and curated by Ulisses Carrilho.

Freely inspired by Nelson Rodrigues’ marginal drama, the exhibition evokes the city—the space of tragedy—as the ground of revelry. In the encounter between flesh and asphalt, these lips reveal an eroticism that disorients the order of the day: where desire spills over, norms are repositioned.

The Kiss on the Asphalt, by Nelson Rodrigues, emerges as a radical gesture, an act of love that, contrary to its sweet surface, is a subterranean blow to the moral order of the city of Rio de Janeiro. The public kiss between two men is not merely a symbol of affection, but a profound subversion of sexual normativity. The asphalt, this hard and cruel surface of the city, is stained by what cannot be contained: the repressed desire that seeps through the cracks of social conventions. In the clash between bodies and norms, the kiss is an act of resistance, a gesture of loving rebellion that tensions the moral fabric of the city and challenges the cisheteronormative regime.

If the kiss on the asphalt symbolizes a rupture with moral normativity, it can also be read as a political metaphor. The kiss is a gesture of transgression, but also of resistance: it challenges the established order, questions social norms, and exposes the hypocrisy of bourgeois morality. In this context, marginality becomes a space of potential transformation.

The exhibition brings together works by artists such as Allan Weber, Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato, Anísio O. Couto, Carlos Vergara, Heitor dos Prazeres, Hélio Oiticica, Ivens Machado, Matheus Chiaratti, Melissa de Oliveira, Miriam Inêz da Silva, Moacir Farias, Sérgio Richard, Ubi Bava, Val Souza, Vera Chaves Barcellos, Victor Arruda, and Yhuri Cruz.