Upstairs Gallery | Hanz Ronald: A Charmed Hour

A Charmed Hour Hanz Ronald Curated by Stavroula Coulianidis September 10 – October 31, 2026 Opening Reception: Thursday, September 10, 6–8pm Uffner & Liu is pleased to present _A Charmed Hour_, the first solo exhibition in New York by Brazilian artist Hanz Ronald, curated by Stavroula Coulianidis. The exhibition brings together a new body of paintings exploring memory, transformation, and the shifting boundaries between the real and imagined. Drawing from various cultural histories to consider his practice in an everchanging world, Ronald conjures realms entirely of his own. Perceptions towards queerness, lived experiences, and everyday surroundings permeate his work. What emerges is less a fixed narrative and rather a constellation of possible ones—a painted world rearranging itself before the viewer. Through fragments, Ronald constructs his paintings - jewelry glinting in the light, a photograph caught in a mirror, smoke drifting through a room, the folds of a curtain, a figure reclining in bed. Familiar details become emotional traces, while interiors take on a psychological charge. Cultural references and ornamentation reflect, in part, the richness of Brazil, but fundamentally speak to Ronald's interest in connections across spaces and time. In his paintings, the unusual meets the ordinary, while body and spirit, ancient and contemporary coexist in an ongoing visual narrative. In one of the exhibition's central works, _Venice Nights_, the geometric language of Brazilian Neo-Concretism encounters the patterns of Venetian Carnival. A carpet recalls Japanese prints, a table evokes French interior, curtains draw from Middle Eastern rooms, all while incorporating traditional handcraft Brazilian embroidery. Each source is altered through its encounter with another, producing an image that resists belonging to any single geography. A similar ambiguity structures _Souvenirs_, in which a room and body appear through the doubled space of a mirror. A dressing table crowded with photographs, candles, and jewelry - belongings from Ronald's own life - is interwoven with imagined objects, such as an Egyptian vessel and a small goddess figure. The intimacy of personal possessions meets the distance of ancestral forms, blurring distinctions between souvenir, artifact, and symbol. Light, color, and adornment give form to these shifting spaces. Prismatic surfaces meet deep shadows, while reflections and patterns complicate the boundaries between figure and ground. Throughout the exhibition, the body remains equally mutable. Figures dissolve into shadows, become entangled with their surroundings, or recede into the interiors. Sensuality emerges through this instability as a sense of intimacy and longing rather than spectacle. Like the figures themselves, scenes occupy a moment suspended between states, charged with what may have happened or what might happen. This uncertainty shapes Ronald's treatment of time – limitless and dynamic. The title _A Charmed Hour_ gives form to this suspended temporality. An hour is brief and measurable, yet here it is untethered from any specific place or chronology. It holds a recollection, a myth, a present encounter, or a future vision. Within this charmed interval, disparate worlds briefly meet. Ronald's paintings become spaces for constructing narratives through which everyday life, relationships, and time can be considered—not as complete truths, but as experiences continually being reimagined. – Stavroula Coulianidis