Matter Of Form, 2011
Pneuma, 2022
Pneuma unfolds in a cultivated iris field, where sculptures converse with the classical Greek elements—earth, water, fire, and air.
First conceived in 2019, the work takes air as its central element, using the balloon as the sculptural armature. Gypsum is poured, shifting from solid to liquid and back again, while wax and ash alter form through the meeting of heat and cold. In this process, painting becomes matter: a layered material surface born from transformation. The cast of an everyday object, such as the balloon, becomes both presence and absence—an entry point into poetic wonder and contemplation of origins.
Air is the living movement that flows in and out of the body–mind, revealing the inseparability of inside and outside.
In ancient Greece, pneuma—that which is breathed or blown—held many meanings. For the pre-Socratic Anaximenes, air was the soul, the element from which all others arise. In Greek medicine, pneuma was believed to enter from the outside air, travel through the arteries to the brain and heart, and there ignite thought and movement. Aristotle linked pneuma to the seed, as a vessel for the transmission of life. For the Stoics, it was the “breath of life” united with the “intelligent spirit.” In Chinese philosophy, air finds its counterpart in Qi, the vital force animating all beings. In Indian medicine, Prana—breath—is the life principle itself.
Mythologically, air embodies the soul. To withhold breath is to suspend the flow of consciousness, to momentarily interrupt the essence of being.
BibliografiaJean Fautrier, Nineteenth century painterPneuma, www.encyclopedia.comTao Te Ching, Lao TzuCarlo Rovelli, The order of timeCorrado Malanga, www.corradomalangaexperience.com
Exuviae, 2021
The title Exuviae first emerged in 2018 during a series of experiments with acrylics poured into plastic, then folded and applied to white canvas. I was unsettled by their animal-like forms—shocking in their revelation of a shamanic undercurrent within my practice. These paintings made it clear that I create first and foremost for myself, yet whatever I experience is also experienced by many, for the self is never separate from the whole. Because of their deep personal resonance, I found it difficult to share them.
Between late 2019 and early 2020, I began having vivid, symbolic dreams of animals and insects shedding their skins and regenerating—most often the salamander. In hermetic alchemy, the salamander embodies the element and spirit of fire. The work evolved into a meditation on duality, layering material, signs, and symbols. Using wax and fire to alter the paper’s surface, the paintings began to resemble skins.
Over the years, living with these works has revealed them as records of transformation—occurring across both celestial and earthly planes—and as reminders of the profound interconnectedness of all things.
We live in a time where the natural flow of awareness is often disrupted—shaped by ideology, scattered attention, and a diminished space for introspection. For me, art is a way back into subjectivity. In creating this moment for myself, I also create it for the viewer.
Um momento grande, parado, sem nada dentro, 2021
A great, still moment, with nothing inside it. Through the "implicit parenthesis" of Clarice Lispector, one gets the impression of the non-existence of time before knowledge and rooted in immediacy.
Exploring the ideas of fragment and whole, the artwork springs from experimental and improvised means of construction, destruction, and reconstruction, canceling dichotomies in a continuous flow of making.
The process consists of collecting and recreating fragments and casts on different materials, arranging what happens in a movement of composition and decomposition.
The work real-izes when it reaches immobility when it is simultaneously a fragment and a whole: the representation of its coming into being and the thing itself.
Plein Air, 2020
Plein Air, French for open-air, is a well-known term in the art history of painting alfresco. The Macchiaioli and French Impressionist painting styles in open air allowed artists to capture natural light in real, physical time.
In my outdoors exhibition, Plein Air, I wanted to experiment with presenting studio work created for an architecture space in the context of rural Tuscan environments; the same landscapes immortalized in numerous Macchiaioli paintings of the late 1800s.
The encounter was an essential experiential focus for my ideas. Coming across or stumbling upon an artwork differs from viewing outdoor artworks and monuments. Scale and placement are made distinctly different in function.
Outdoor artworks or monuments impose assertion, while an artwork immersed in the landscape feels nearer to finding a rare butterfly in perfumed spring times.
A nnica, 2019, Rome, Italy.
A NICCA is born out of the idea of negative space. Drawing from quotidian objects, manufactured and organic found, I'm interested in retaining the impression of the original thing, transforming it into something else, pointing to the idea of origin.
The works develop from traditional art mediums, painting, sculpture, photography, and installation, intermingling their formal structures and creating open edges and fragment- forms.
Boundaries are spatial. In fragmenting them, I'm interested in how permutations create new perspectives. The subject of the work signals itself, referencing coming into being or becoming. Becoming what?
Introspectively, the work starts from various organic actions (activity, gesture) performed from the reverse side, mostly in plaster, pigments, paints, resin, and wax, such as pouring, stratifying, imprinting, tearing, pulling, and building.
These gestures-findings are then collected like records and structured with geometries, open frames, and spatial relationships, creating improvised compositions among works and with the exhibition space's architecture.
Stratifications and Remnants, 2018
Mexico City, and Anderson Ranch, residencies.
a descoberta, 2014 - thesis exhibition.
My thesis, titled a descoberta, 2014, means in Portuguese act or purpose of discovering, and it explores fragment and whole, plurality and singularity utilizing the exhibition space as a ground for composition. In an endless self-referential loop of materials and referents, I am interested in reflecting on how meanings and hierarchies lose their oppositional forces and cancel each other out. I continuously define a system that utilizes oppositions: flatness and volume, chaos and structure, form and formless, absence and presence, interiority and exteriority, artificial and natural. These oppositions are made apparent through materials and processes that help me discover new ideas that, in turn, can be introduced in the next piece.
In the act of seeing, a direct relationship with the world is established through the experience of being.
The medium of plaster and photography directly relates to time, positive and negative impressions, and as an index to man-made (culture) and raw materiality (nature).
Installation and video experimentation.
Reconstructions, 2012
