Avenida Paulista is more than just a strip of concrete. It is a place where time blends with the future, where the city reveals itself to the world as a laboratory of ideas, cultures, and technologies. At the heart of this avenue that never sleeps, FIESP now hosts one of the most thought-provoking exhibitions ever held on Latin American soil. Its name is SYNTHETIKA, and its purpose goes far beyond art, inviting us to reflect on what lies ahead.
Curated by Ricardo Barreto, director of the International Festival of Electronic Language, the exhibition offers a direct and honest look at our time, an era in which human creativity begins to share space with machines. It’s no longer just about painting, composing music, or writing poetry. We now face a new form of creation, built four-handedly, between people and artificial intelligences.
This phenomenon is not in the future, it is already here, and it is changing everything, the way we create, how we are moved emotionally, and even how we define what art is.
As visitors walk through the exhibition panels, they realize that art is no longer a solitary act. It has become a dialogue. The images appear to come from another planet, or perhaps from a digital lab where algorithms, prompts, and imagination merge. There are colorful waves reminiscent of galaxies, bursts of light that seem like emotions encoded in color. But behind each shape lies a new creative process, the artist, and even the visitor, trigger a set of commands, the machine interprets them, and returns astonishing images. It is art born from a conversation between the human mind and silicon.
This coexistence with the artificial, far from threatening creativity, is opening new paths. Synthetic intelligences are not just tools, they are partners. And from this partnership, an art emerges that does not imitate the past but reveals what had not yet been seen.
That is what SYNTHETIKA proposes: to think of art as a mirror of a world in transformation. The curator uses a concept drawn from philosophy – Zeitsynthetik, the age of the synthetic. A time when algorithms step onto the stage of culture and machines begin to collaborate in the creation of meaning. Perhaps we are witnessing the birth of a new language, not purely human, not purely artificial, but something in between, something hybrid, vibrant, and unexpected.
And São Paulo is undoubtedly the right place for such a birth. No other city in Brazil, and few in the world, gathers so many cultures, pulses with so many ideas, and embraces so many contradictions as the São Paulo metropolis. This exhibition could not have found a more fitting address than Avenida Paulista, that symbolic artery where everything converges, protest, the fight for freedom of expression, poetry, the concrete and the digital.
SYNTHETIKA is more than an exhibition. It is an open question. What will art become when humans are no longer its sole creators? And more than that, what makes us human in this emerging world?
The answer may not be in books. It is written on the walls of the gallery.
