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Tálisson Melo

At nineteen, in downtown Madrid, I spent a morning browsing men’s formalwear shops. Black trousers and white shirts dominated the scene, punctuated by a few muted tones of blue, grey, and brown — a landscape without surprises. My mission was to honor my mother’s investment, as she had sent me money to buy “a nicer outfit” for a public event at the university where I was to receive congratulaciones. I looked for a shirt that was both affordable and comfortable, yet capable of “projecting” the seriousness that such recognition seemed to require. Wearing the chosen shirt, I had the sensation that my skin fused with the fabric and that something in me had shifted forever (?!)… Since then, I wore that shirt no more than four times, up until I turned twenty-six. I’ve kept it uselessly hanging in the closet to this day; the fact that it still fits reveals a persistent mold in relation to my more adult body.

Now, at thirty-four, writing this text for Célio Braga’s exhibition — which we’ve titled Enviesado — I accept the idea of entrusting this shirt to his care. A garment marked by a singular memory of the ritualization of a certain masculinity/civility. I know the shirt will be deconstructed into cuts and strips, stretched and wrapped around a wooden frame to become one of the many textile portraits in the series perfect friends - perfect lovers. Each portrait begins with this same act of undoing shirts offered by men with whom Célio maintains some kind of relationship — friends, lovers, partners, colleagues, acquaintances, fathers, sons, brothers, nephews; younger and older, Brazilian and foreign, heterosexual, bisexual, homosexual… Then, they are reconstructed through sewing and embroidery in a new configuration, on rectangular modules measuring 35 x 30 cm. The various colors, patterns, fabric types, and details — darts, pleats, pockets, plackets, labels, buttons, and buttonholes — give shape to the distinctive features of each portrait.

Célio works with things anchored in memories of use — objects that have lived close to the skin, covering and protecting it, but above all serving as molds for what already exists in the world and acts upon the body, and for the way the body positions itself in the world. There is also a gesture of detachment in offering them up, somehow tied to undressing and allowing oneself to be touched — something inherent to the varied relationships between men, which the work reenacts through the obvious presence of touch, of the artist being seen as inhabiting these bodies through the skin, from the inside out. Skin as a mediating matter that merges self and world — “be matter itself!”.[1]

In earlier works, Célio photographed and printed images of skin on paper, which he then pierced and sutured, highlighting its porosity and permeability as an indistinct extension between inside and outside — of and within relationships, affective exchanges.[2] By destroying shirts and reframing their fragments into a new arrangement before sewing them back together — meticulously embroidering the overlapping and entangled parts — Célio’s creative act unfolds through hours of bodily engagement, full of impulses and calculations: a constant negotiation with the materials, with his desire, his technique, and his own body at work.

Upon learning more about Célio’s personal and artistic trajectory and becoming part of the process through which he has been creating these imperfect portraits of friend-lovers, I revisited the questions Michel Foucault answered in a 1981 interview regarding the homosexual way of life:[3]

What kinds of relationships can be established, invented, multiplied, and modulated through homosexuality? How is it possible for men to be together?

To live together, share their time, meals, rooms, leisure, sufferings, knowledge, confidences?

What does it mean to be among men, “undressed,” outside institutional relations—family, profession, obligatory companionship?

The open-ended answer to his own question points to the possibility of reimagining relationships, friendship, intimacy, and communal life. This resonates strongly in Célio’s work. This desire–unease invites the reinvention of variable, individually modulated relationships, still without fixed forms, which project beyond the sexual act between men or the idea of amorous fusion of identities — thus, each portrait gradually takes shape and receives the name of the person who once wore the deconstructed garment. Establishing a homosexual way of life, introducing pleasure and love where only law, rules, or habit were once seen, disrupts the traditional logic of the nuclear family and heteronormativity. This series of embroidered portraits can be seen as the materialization of diverse possibilities for weaving relationships, constructing unique and malleable forms of contact and connection with other men. In the warp of care, pleasure, intimacy, ethics, complicity, companionship, eroticism, and desire, the pieces reveal relatively reversible rearrangements, open to further reconfigurations:

Homosexuality is a historic occasion to open up a whole range of affective and relational virtualities, not only within a couple but on the scale of life, work, friendship, society; to make diagonal lines [oblique, slanted, bent, biased, enviesado…] function in the social fabric.[4]

With the sartorial structure of dress shirts and the gestures of adjusting and buttoning them, images of a disciplined body routinize the stereotype of masculinity associated with rationality, authority, hygiene, asepsis, seriousness, professionalism, order, and control. Narrow-cuffed white shirts, in particular, emphasized the standardization of a collective masculine identity linked to the “neutral” and the “universal,” values associated with the hegemonic performance of gender, class, and race in bourgeois society at least since the mid-19th century.[5] We already have a history of the relationship between fashion and queer culture permeated by multifaceted expressions of nonconformity; the appropriation of shirts in parties, streets, and runways affirms the artificiality of binary orders of femininity and masculinity, generating other configurations, sometimes so radical that they shake even the notion of a human form. However, the conventional shirts employed by Célio in these recent works draw more attention to the maintenance of this mold of male bodies, the ambiguous interstices between conformity, repression, docility, and concealment on one side, and eroticism, casualness, and camp irony on the other. Through the deconstruction of each shirt and its “enviesada” reconstruction — along the oblique lines of lived relationships — misalignment, distortion, and inadequacy emerge.

Playing with unbuttoned buttonholes, some holes and gaps in the coverage of the near-surface sometimes become more or less evident, yet are always noisy to the attentive and close gaze. Clearly intentional, these openings allow each portrait to breathe and pulse on the verge of being undone again or altered by more patches, other layers of fabric, some skin or body that interposes itself there, before the wall. The same happens with the scraps or folds that detach from the rectangle or plane like abscesses, appendages, scars, or tentacles. These might be clues of a disinterest in absolute framing, evidence of the desire to overflow that each relationship implies. Both elements reinforce the detachment from finish; the careful craftsmanship embodied in the embroidery also displays error, deviation, patching, and unsuccessful corrections—signs of negotiations never fully free of friction or opacity, between body-mind and object-matter, between self and other — as experienced in relation.

The art historian and psychoanalyst Rozsika Parker mapped the historical process of the decline in status of embroidery[6] from the late Middle Ages until its consolidation within the constellation of “minor arts.” Also in the nineteenth century, with the division between art and craft, embroidery shifted from an elevated art form practiced by both men and women—particularly in England—to being seen as an inferior craft and a marginalized feminine activity confined to the domestic sphere, done by women “for love.” This situates the practice of embroidery at the center of the affirmation of a hegemonic ideology of femininity. Parker cites research data from the late 1970s—when it was claimed that “embroidery is the favorite pastime of 2% of British men, roughly the same number who attend church regularly.” She highlights the persistence of this stereotype and the asymmetries embedded within the sexual division of labor: “only queers and women sew and go to church.”[7]

More recently, historian Joseph McBrinn,[8] in direct dialogue with Rozsika Parker, has examined the role of embroidery in both the construction and subversion of masculinity. While there are records of embroidery being part of working-class boys’ basic education in the nineteenth century—as a means to calm them down—and of sailors traditionally practicing embroidery during periods of leisure, making gifts for loved ones without undermining the hypermasculinity associated with their profession, one of the effects of embroidery’s central role in the “construction of femininity” has been its stigmatization as “effeminizing,” as well as its assertion as a kind of “bold emblem of queer self-identification.” Challenging the rigidity of heteronormativity in contexts where homosexuality was criminalized, gay men embroidered intimate codifications of their sexual and affective lives—eventually flaunting embroidery in the camp celebration of the possibilities of their own existence. Far from affirming any essentialized notion of femininity, gayness, queerness, docility, or love through embroidery, it is still possible to recognize how this meticulous practice has historically asserted itself as a symbol of care and affection, while also inscribing a noisy political claim that resides in the details.



Seeing my portrait completed — with my shirt destroyed, stained, and restitched, still bearing my name as its title — I recognize certain folds of a past that still fits my body, but that also begins to detach from me. A few grams of plaster dust, once embedded in the skin, clogging pores and stiffening every joint, start to dissipate. It is as if Célio’s gesture could reach into the musculature, the nerves, the tendons, releasing the body from an inner straitjacket. In the frame, undone and reconfigured, the shirt draws attention to everything that could not be contained or molded. By finishing each of the textile portraits in perfect friends – perfect lovers with embroidery, Célio Braga’s work, presented in Enviesado, becomes part of this weave of reinventions around the existence of relationships between men and the very idea of masculinity—enacting, too, the repetition of that propositional gesture I see articulated in the final lines of a poem by Camila Sosa Villada[9]:
…

Let us go on loving each other in this swamp of contradictions.

Let us keep holding hands in the street,

kissing on the train and hugging on the grass.

Let us go on dressing as women,

go on dressing as men.

Let us go on forgiving and loving,

and may we not turn away from the slow and steady labor of love…

even if it sounds sentimental.

The truth is, some things are no longer obvious.

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[1] Direct quotation from The Temptation of Saint Anthony by Gustave Flaubert (1874) inscribed in the work Deliriously (2005).

[2] Ernst van Alphen (2006) evokes the notion of the skin ego by psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu to emphasize the denial of the skin as an absolute boundary between individual and world in Célio Braga’s work, approaching it more as “intimate connectivities” to affirm a vulnerable body.

[3] De l'amitié comme mode de vie. Interview with Michel Foucault by R. de Ceccatty, J. Danet, and J. le Bitoux, published in Gai Pied newspaper, no. 25, April 1981. We read the translation into Portuguese by Wanderson Flor do Nascimento, published on the website Espaço Michel Foucault (2001). S. Lotringer (Ed.), Foucault Live: Interviews, 1961–1984 (1989).

[4] The original text in French says: « L’homosexualité est une occasion historique d’ouvrir toute une série de virtualités affectives et relationnelles, non seulement à l’intérieur d’un couple mais à l’échelle de la vie, du travail, de l’amitié, de la société ; de faire fonctionner des lignes diagonales dans le tissu social. »

[5] A relação da moda com os estereótipos de gênero é escrutinada por Joanne Entwistle em The Fashionable Body: Fashion, Dress & Modern Social Theory (2015).

[6] Rozsika Parker. The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (1984).

[7] Regarding the presence of embroidery in Brazilian art, including references to other male artists who have employed the technique, see the exhibition catalogue Transbordar: Transgressions of Embroidery in Art, curated by Ana Paula Simioni at Sesc Pinheiros, São Paulo, featuring texts by Rosana Paulino and Carmen Cordero Reiman (2020–2021).

[8] Joseph McBrinn. Queering the Subversive Stitch: Men and the Culture of Needlework (2020).

[9] Publicado primeiramente em 2015, o poema foi traduzido do espanhol por Joca Reiners e publicado na coletânea A namorada de Sandro(2024).