A robust female elephant strides into the room. Majestic and uncomplicated, she positions herself within the space, occupying almost its entirety. In her slender trunk, the animal delicately holds a shimmering sapphire the size of an apple, radiating its color so powerfully that it turns everything around it blue. Composed of white brushstrokes and outlined by a thin purple rim, the precious stone echoes the theory of the German Josef Albers (1888-1976), that our perception of color depends entirely on the context to which we are exposed. The scene described above occurred during a dream of the Brasiliense artist Renato Rios in the months leading up to the arrival of his daughter, Aurora. The fantastic plot turned into a canvas and now also names his first solo exhibition as an artist represented by Galeria Estação. On the opposite wall, also located on the mezzanine of the exhibition space, is Great Spirit. The large-scale painting, done in the same lysergic blue that reinforces Rios's skill in the study of color, draws the viewer towards it, as if we could penetrate the magical portal that opens when facing it. Its title indicates one of the possible paths to unravel it. The Great Spirit, also known as Wakan Tanka among many indigenous cultures of the Americas, speaks of the divine, the great mystery of life and beyond it. The Great Spirit has often been conceptualized as a deity that connects us to spirituality, manifesting as the sound of the universe that permeates everything, resonating in the artist's painting through fine chromatic circles that seem to vibrate a kind of melody. Between the two powerful paintings unfold on each side 36 small-format canvases. Each of them resonates like a musical note, and together they compose a symphony of colors that unfolds continuously, forming pathways along the sides of the space. As we traverse them with our eyes, it's as if we realize that these canvases are born from each other in a poetic and interconnected cadence. There is an installative quality in Rios's production that takes shape like an Ouroboros, where each painting emerges from the other, perpetuating an infinite virtuous circle. The exhibition design proposed by the artist for the two spaces of Galeria Estação emphasizes his experiential relationships with painting. While color and its abstraction take center stage on the mezzanine, suggesting a celestial experience to the viewer, in the earthly world of the ground floor, Rios proposes a chromatic study focused on the vegetal, mineral, and animal universes, bringing us back to our roots. In this way, we see color as the subject in different formats, as it creeps through a crack or crevice through which it is possible to access a new place, a portal of contact between sensations that surround the sky and the earth. It is through this same passage that we also return from this experience, in a continuous movement of ingress and egress, like the systole and diastole of a heart. Thus, Rios's paintings are, each of them, passages, portals of arrival and departure, from and to points of infinite possibilities that light, landscape, and animate and inanimate beings born from his paints provide us. For Rios, painting is the space where the artist achieves self-realization. It's a time and space where he gathers faculties in analytical fields and in the different phenomena of perception. His practice leads him to a certain state of mind that promotes his path of self-improvement. It is also through painting that he manages to converge different worlds, real and imaginary. In this way, it reinforces his aggregating role, which allows him to celebrate and synthesize experiences. Through this medium, he connects with his innermost self, a creative spiritual field that he believes is essential to life. In his thought and in his production, Rios suggests the union between nature and culture, two concepts that we often consider disparate, almost diametrically opposed. Modernity has been based for years on the dichotomy of this idea, as if from the construction of something that intellectually nourishes us, we distance ourselves from our origin, the earth. According to Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), "in man, everything is natural, and everything is made." We are a combination of the natural and the cultural, and this may be the singularity, and why not, the power and wonder of Homo sapiens. It is in the confluence of these two territories that among the layers of carefully overlaid colors, men emerge as bridges between these two universes that compose us. Whether at rest, with a steady gaze on the horizon, or in action, paddling through the waters, the human as portrayed by Rios does not lead us to a feeling of confrontation, but rather to the harmony of physical and mental coexistence between the natural and the cultural, as Merleau-Ponty argues. The consonance of universes gains strength in such figures, suggesting a meeting of different ethnicities, references, and ancestries. The artist's choices resonate with the thoughts of Antônio Bispo dos Santos (1959-2023), who in his cosmological vision says that a river does not cease to be a river because it merges with others, quite the contrary. It becomes itself and many rivers, strengthening. "When we merge, we do not cease to be ourselves, we become ourselves and another – we yield. Confluence is a force that increases, that expands." Such confluence in Rios's production unites visualities, connecting the figurative and abstract worlds. And, as Bispo asserts, this communion does not diminish the potency of the work; quite the opposite, it adds up, gaining contours, flashes, nuances, different flavors that only those who deeply study the alchemy of paints can achieve. Among the thousands of possibilities of the earth, a hundred possible aromas are born, which transit in this space of light and shadow. Initially, we recognize the strength and beauty of the specific tones conceived by Rios. It takes time to reach the degree of miscegenation proposed by the artist, which leads to such effects. His painting leads us to enchantment, immortalizing the fraction of a second of the brush's movement. As Guimarães Rosa said on his induction into the Brazilian Academy of Letters in 1967, "The world is magical: people do not die, they become enchanted." And so are the figures that occupy the artist's canvases. In the figurative layers, we also encounter animals, a constant presence in his artistic repertoire. We observe the procession of a troop of horses, the graceful sway of their manes, and the gentle curve of their hooves as they draw near to one another. His brushstrokes welcome us into this landscape, creating movement, bringing forth in us the sound of the footsteps and everything else that we do not see but perceive to exist in such a scene. Similarly, the maned wolf traverses the scene, often depicted in the landscapes of the cerrado, a biome intimately familiar to the artist. Other beings also permeate the painter's canvases, allowing their presence to flirt between the real and the imaginary and once again putting Rios's painting into perspective. There we also find other references from his personal environment, such as artemisia, an aromatic and shrubby plant with medicinal characteristics. Descending from the sky, stars of various hues grace his canvases, serving as a poignant reminder of the link between the divine and the terrestrial, as we are all progeny of the earth, fire, water, and air.