Solfejo

by Marc Pottier, 2025

Solfejo – Solo Exhibition
CAIXA Cultural Curitiba

Felippe Moraes is a polymath: artist, researcher, curator, set designer, writer… He also belongs to that Rio de Janeiro family devoted to a city of a thousand sounds. His banner, displayed in the window of his studio in São Paulo and clearly legible from the street, is a red neon sign reading “Quero viver no Carnaval” [I want to live in Carnival], part of a series he calls SAMBA EXALTAÇÃO, (featured in this exhibition) created during the pandemic. It is the spirit of an artist deeply focused on his audience, who wants to see them take part and enjoys immersing them in his work. It is no surprise, then, that he returns with Solfejo to Caixa Cultural Curitiba, in the fourth version of an exhibition first created in 2019 at Centro Cultural FIESP in São Paulo.

In philosophy and in music, Solfejo, a term derived from the Italian word Solfeggio, comes from combining the names of two musical notes: Sol and Fá. It was created by an eleventh-century Italian Benedictine monk, Guido D’Arezzo. It can be understood as a symbolic system that structures and organizes the perception and understanding of the sonic world. It represents a universal language of music, allowing scores to be read, written, and interpreted. Beyond its technical function, music theory can be seen as a method for developing a “sonic awareness” and a deeper appreciation of music. It is this experience that Felippe proposes in his exhibition.

This new polyphonic exhibition seems to think and organize itself with a very precise, deliberate order. It is an introduction that invites you into a complex world, at times interactive, in which thought will be called upon extensively, and where the public will be led into deep reverie.

All the works in this exhibition are in dialogue with one another within a context of total art: of the body’s relationship, of randomness, of diverse references intertwining physically and mentally. The artist invites you to sing along with the images, with his gestures and thoughts, neon signs, photographs of sound drawings (each titled with its frequency, from 97 to 1228 hertz), installations…

Felippe addresses his audience relentlessly with his textual exclamations — “Atenção para o refrão” [Watch for the chorus], right at the entrance to the exhibition; “Não deixa o Samba morrer” [Don’t let the Samba die]; “Canta Forte/Alto” [Sing Loud/High] (this last one, created in 2021 and installed on the façade of the Mário de Andrade Library in São Paulo, intoning the music of Martinho da Vila) … These neon light-texts — an essential medium of contemporary art, created by the French chemist Georges Claude (1870–1960), who transformed the image of cities — have worked their way into art to enrich and question it. Artists have explored the specificities of this medium to expand the visual field, create emotions, and provoke the viewer’s reflection. They have opted for figuration or for language, as in the history of human culture — from the caves of Lascaux to hieroglyphs. Felippe, in turn, uses his neon messages to converse with the public throughout the exhibition, like echoes inviting them to move forward, discover more of his proposals, and understand, through this series, how samba — a Brazilian musical genre originating among urban Afro-Brazilian communities in Rio de Janeiro in the early twentieth century — is a way of life. Felippe also chose neon to compose the constellations of Solaris Discotecum.

Solaris Discotecum (2023) is an immersive model of the universe, with a grand mirrored globe at its center, slowly rotating among the 12 constellations of the zodiac. It is the way the artist found to remind us of our smallness before the universe. But beyond that, Felippe subtly wants to invite into the dance of his exhibition the thought of the celebrated German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) and his heliocentric hypothesis. Kepler stated that the Earth revolves around the Sun — but, above all, that the planets do not move in perfectly circular paths, but elliptical ones. In the exhibition, Felippe adopts the thinking of the ellipse: the complexity of his artistic propositions forces the audience to fill in the gaps (since it is impossible to explain the full density of his thought through wall texts), to arrive at the essential and at the aesthetic shock of his work. Above all, the artist wants the observer to guess at the layers of the universes he describes in his Solfejo.

This work engages in dialogue with the film Harmonices Mundi (2017), another tribute to Kepler and to the book of the same name published in 1619. In it, the astronomer expresses, in musical terms, his convictions about the connections between the physical and the spiritual. For Kepler, the universe is an image of God; the harmony of music reflects that of the universe and of its creator.

The entire Solfejo exhibition by Felippe Moraes is Platonic. Music runs through the whole of Plato’s work. It is present everywhere and contributes to the construction of the project of a new city. The Republic plays this role especially: the history of Athens runs through the dialogues that shape the project of an ideal city, formulated in response to political turbulence. The ideal city is the personification of harmony — the same harmony found in nature. Plato believed that music exerted a direct influence on the soul. But this influence was strictly dichotomous: good or bad. Its great power derived from the relationship the Greeks drew between music and astronomy. According to Pythagoras’s numerical theory, music was governed by mathematical laws — just as the celestial spheres were. This is precisely what Felippe speaks to in his exhibition: the same arithmetic proportions are present in music and in nature, granting the former a certain power over the soul — to the point that the movements of the stars were considered perfect. For Felippe, as for Plato, music must necessarily be associated with speech (lógos) — in this case, with poetic speech. When music serves poetic speech, it awakens interest. It thus draws closer to lógos, the tool of philosophy. And it is through it that philosophers initiate human beings into the Ideas.

Song and enchantment: for Felippe, life and death are very close. Music can re-enchant the world; it is an invitation to transform life. The artist is interested in mental singing, the kind that activates our musical memories tied to the best of our experiences. He offers his Solfejo to encourage us to reinvent our own harmonies. An invitation to survival!

Marc Pottier
2025