The show Agua De Matar Passarinho [Water to kill little birds] by the Brazilian artist Thomas Szott at the Duplex AIR studio complex in Graça features oil paintings and hand-sewn fabric works, weaving an intimate web of connections between a tightly selected set of symbols. The centerpiece is a large patchwork quilt titled Bad at Love (all works 2024), embroidered with journal entries about love, heartbreak, and some of the artist’s earliest sexual experiences as a queer teenage boy. He later censored himself, “scribbling” with string over selected words, passages, even whole paragraphs — and given how sexually explicit and emotionally gut-wrenching the uncensored entries are, one can imagine the kind of sensitive details which had to be “penciled” out in blue.

Contrasting the nominal restraint of the quilt is the eyebrow-raising painting At first, in which we see a man’s ass and genitalia exposed from behind, a childish five-point star outlining the anus. Two other small paintings feature the star motif. Stardom simply features a five-pointed star in black, with two little eyes streaked with tears. The black star clearly becomes a euphemistic stand-in for the orifice highlighted in the aforementioned work. Then in the painting On this side, a hand delicately reaches up towards a single star in the sky, the fingers’ shape suggesting a sensual touch. Another painting picks up the finger theme, with one hand nervously bending back the swollen red fingers of the other, as we are led on a journey from one resonant symbol to the next.

Stuffed liquor bottles are scattered on the floor, each one emblazoned with the letters of the artist’s name. Any light-heartedness here is ironic because they represent an escapist time when Szott was drinking too much — suddenly the exhibition title “Water to kill little birds” makes perfect sense. There is also a stuffed sculpture of a clown-like gimp mask on a pedestal, titled To put on a happy face. Once again this seems playful, until you realize that the patchwork pieces evoke the human skin mask made by the psycho killer in the film Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and there are words on the back: “DO YOU LIKE ME BETTER THIS WAY?” They look like the cut-and-paste letters of a ransom note, and they recall a painful memory recounted on the quilt, about a lover who would only have sex with him face down — as opposed to another journal entry where he writes of being flipped every which way, feeling weightless. An elegant little tag at the nape of the clown’s neck reads “Thomas Szott,” which could be a signature, but it could also be a label, as if to designate the work a self-portrait.

In fact, all the works approach self-portraiture in a way, as the narratives from the quilt merge with the symbols in the paintings to immerse us in the artist’s inner world. Consider Jealous all the time, a modestly sized green painting of a naked young boy squatting on the balls of his feet, his face shrouded in shadow save for eyes that glint menacingly in the darkness (recalling the crying star in Stardom). We don’t need to wonder what he’s thinking: he is clearly green with envy. Such is the beauty of this show, as the artist makes us feel weightless ourselves, drifting effortlessly from one association to another like birds on the breeze — until suddenly we hit a pane of glass and come crashing down to earth once more.

Água De Matar Passarinho, Thomas Szott at Duplex AIR, is on until October 25.