New release from the artist.

"Containing 138 pages, 20 X-ray images of blooms, and an Introduction by *Barthélémy Mercier*, a French cross-disciplinary/transdisciplinary researcher, as a complementary counterpoint to his previous release, Das Biest oder die Schöne? Die schöne Bestie (The Beast or Beauty? The Beautiful Beast), such volume brings together two unpublished essays by **Otacílio Melgaço**, where the author develops, with acuity and theoretical depth, the interrelations between his own artistic practice and the thought of these two indispensable Gallic figures.  
  
On one side, Maffesoli lends the call for affective communion and collective warmth against modern isolation — a path along which **Melgaço** stakes a claim for his art as a territory of re-enchantment, where the sensible, the everyday, and small shared rituals return to the spectator a sense of belonging to a common destiny.

On the other, Deligny offers the critical instrument to prevent this communion from degenerating into complacency: errancy, silence, and the trace resisting every fixed identity, every crystallizing form. In this gesture — in constant groping and charting the untamable — **Otacílio** discovers a praxis refusing utility, proposing an art of "living-with," a network of pure presence welcoming deviation, incompleteness, and what ordinary words can no longer reach.

Far from a peaceful conciliation, **Melgaço** operates a living tension: his art is the perpetual movement of drawing together what modernity has torn asunder — warmth and void, ritual and deviation, belonging and errancy — without ever resolving this contradiction. From this very tension emerges the only belonging still worth pursuing: a common intertwining, visceral and intense, woven precisely where Maffesoli and Deligny touch.

We invite the reader to traverse these essays with due attention. What is at stake is not merely one artist's work, but a question cutting across us all: what can art still accomplish today, in a world insisting on isolating us within our own solitude?

It is a world that celebrates digital connectivity while deepening the abyss between bodies, multiplying screens so eyes never meet, converting experience into data and encounter into transaction. A world reducing the other to a function, turning public space into a corridor of passage and offering infinite choices so we choose nothing beyond ourselves. A world teaching us to speak without addressing anyone, to share without partaking — and which, for all these reasons, renders art an act of almost insolent resistance, a gesture insisting on restoring to the sensible its density and to the verily human its urgency."

L. de Sanctis (Mel-em-Branca Pub Co.)

  
To dive into the work, the link. 

DU PROCHAIN LOINTAIN TRANSFIGURÉ : A Book-Object By OTACÍLIO MELGAÇO