In Tours, the epic tropics of Jonathan de Andrade

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The castle in the town of Indre-et-Loire showcases the work of the artist who, through grating associations between images and words, disrupts the festive and exotic imagery of Brazil, particularly of the Northeast where he lives, to denounce its structural inequalities.

The film "O Peixe" (2016) focuses on the bodies of fishermen in mangroves, who hug and caress large, suffocating fish. (Jonathas de Andrade)

The mercury is rising at the Château de Tours. Exhibiting as part of the Brazil-France 2025 season, Brazilian artist Jonathas de Andrade warms the old stone halls of the historic monument in a joyful celebration, where desire and the bodies of the inhabitants of the Nordeste unfold, as well as their frustrations and revolts. Because for Jonathas de Andrade, celebration in Brazil goes hand in hand with hangovers and headaches. Isn't it in the mood that the masks fall and the truth comes out?

"Tropical Hangover and Other Stories" is both the title of the exhibition and that of a work presented at the heart of the exhibition. Combining the diary of a parking attendant in the 1970s with photographs of the city of Recife, this installation brought the artist to prominence in 2009. We perceive a disenchantment, through aerial views, buildings under construction, and snapshots of parties or sunbathing on the beach (an archive unearthed at a private home). Beneath these photos, in counterpoint, the guard's sentences display his many female conquests in a mechanical, emotionless way. "When a friend found this diary in a trash can, it exploded in my head. It allows me to tell the story of a city in ruins but reinventing itself. In this work, I seek tension, a contrast of emotional temperature between the personal photos, the architecture, and the text." From this polyphonic narrative