Randolpho Lamonier (1988) works across different media, including textile art, painting, video, and installation. Beyond formal diversity, his practice establishes encounters between images of vernacular culture and experimental procedures. In his research, word and image are always in dialogue, often addressing micro- and macro-politics, chronicles, diaries, and intersections between memory and fiction.

In Digging in the dark Searching for the hidden truth, the body’s secrets (2025), we see well-behaved flowers, precisely stitched onto fabrics and canvas, resting in seemingly peaceful arrangements. Upon closer inspection, however, everything begins to unravel: textile still lifes made from scraps of fabric and underwear, embroidery, plush, buttons, beads, and leather intertwine with words scattered like clues to something never fully revealed. Each image is accompanied by an unpublished haiku—brief and piercing—like a message sent late at night: ambiguous, pulsating, stained with love and hate.

The work builds itself in the tension between the delicate and the explicit, laughter and melancholy, and the classical and the contemporary. It is an attempt to eroticize the very act of composition—and to force an encounter (in this case, a truly forced one) between the Japanese haiku and the European still life.

By stitching these figures, often with tags drawn from digital pornographic vocabulary, the artist inserts the intimacy of manual touch into a space inhabited by algorithms, programmed desires, and fantasies ready for consumption. There is humor, yes, but also a certain melancholy: the realization that in our encounters, physical or virtual, we project onto the other our own flaws, remnants, shadows, and deepest vulnerabilities. The eroticism that runs through the series is not pure pleasure: it is also noise, friction, and at times an “excess of absence.” The work, ultimately, is an invitation to estrangement: to recognize that the flower is never just a flower and that language, even in its most delicate or economical form, is never harmless.