The same problem emerges in the relationship between the two artists. Varejão and Paulino arrive at the project with such fully developed visual languages that each work quickly returns to its own genealogy. The sense is that one practice rarely passes through or destabilizes the other. The exhibition promises harmony and dissonance, but what it offers above all is an exceptionally well-resolved coexistence, leaving little space for improvisation or for whatever might arise unexpectedly from the encounter.

In place of the third thing implied by the idea of composition, we encounter two extraordinarily recognizable artists articulated through a curatorial framework that knows exactly where their practices converge. This may be why the exhibition sometimes feels like a dual retrospective. Flesh, the colonial wound, botany, memory, violence, spirituality, and reparation construct a common vocabulary. Yet the spatial experience rarely produces relationships that escape this interpretive field, which has largely been established in advance. The plant begins to trouble us again. The comigo-ninguém-pode appears ornamental until someone comes too close, when its toxicity reveals itself. The pavilion produces the inverse effect: the closer we get, the less dangerous it becomes, as we increasingly encounter what the international art world has already learned to recognize in Rosana Paulino and Adriana Varejão.

That sense of security acquires another layer when we consider the positions the two artists occupy within the art system. In an essay published in The Art Journal, Stephanie Brady Cummings draws attention to an asymmetry seldom addressed in the reception of the pavilion. Adriana Varejão, represented by Gagosian and Victoria Miro, holds the record for a work selling for US$1.8 million at auction, with approximately US$15.3 million in cumulative public sales. Rosana Paulino has achieved extraordinary institutional circulation, with works held in collections including MoMA, Tate, and Centre Pompidou, while her presence on the secondary market remains significantly smaller.

These numbers tell us very little about the artistic value of the works and a great deal about the systems that assign value to them. Paulino and Varejão arrive in Venice with equally substantial and widely recognized careers, yet they have been incorporated into the mechanisms of market valuation in markedly different ways. If Comigo ninguém pode brings the two artists together as interlocutors within a shared history, perhaps it would also have been worth moving closer to this difference, making visible the structures that allowed practices of such significance to acquire such different commercial positions.

The question matters even more because a national pavilion carries an old and still remarkably effective fiction: the idea that artists, artworks, and discourses can occupy a building and, for a few months, offer some possible image of a country. Diane Lima herself acknowledges that working within this format confronts the project with a dilemma she describes as a “crisis of representation,” leading the team to ask which Brazil is being presented and how its history might be retold from perspectives capable of accounting for its complexity. The exhibition thus clearly attempts to multiply the viewpoints from which the country can be imagined: bringing together two distinct female perspectives and allowing Brazil to emerge, as the curator proposes, somewhere between reflection and shadow rather than settling into a single version of itself.

Comigo ninguém pode responds to this crisis by presenting an image of Brazil that is female, Black, shaped by colonial experience, spirituality, nature, and popular forms of knowledge. This image carries enormous significance in the face of an official history so often constructed through the erasure of precisely these subjects. At the same time, another question emerges once a counternarrative reaches the institutional center and becomes part of the image the country itself chooses to project.

Perhaps this is where the real danger of taking too few risks becomes visible. Comigo ninguém pode chooses a plant as its image whose force lies precisely in the impossibility of separating protection from toxicity. Yet it constructs a representation of Brazil in which tensions are acknowledged, organized, and to a considerable degree pacified. The pavilion speaks the language of In Minor Keys when it turns to spirituality, nature, multiple forms of knowledge, and the possibility of imagining other worlds. What is missing is a willingness to let that language contaminate the form of the exhibition itself, to unsettle the architecture, the encounter between the artists, and even the image of Brazil being constructed there. Perhaps touching the comigo-ninguém-pode would mean precisely this: leaving the pavilion less protected by what we already know and more exposed to whatever the exhibition might still be capable of putting at risk.