Five Brazilian Emerging Artists that I’m Watching
Brazil has probably some of the best contemporary artists in South America. I'm drawn to their use of color, playful styles and happy messages. And who doesn't want to live with happy art? Not happy as in frivolous, shallow art, not that. The kind of happy art I'm talking about is the one that exudes optimism, the one that triggers reactions that make people think and feel about a better life and a better world. And Brazilians are very good at that. I've been watching the work of these five artists for a while and I’m excited to see them evolve. They are still young and affordable. I have no crystal ball to see the future but if they continue producing amazingly creative high-quality pieces, I think they can go far.
MARIA NEPOMUCENO
This native Carioca (from Rio de Janeiro) works with ropes using traditional weaving methods. I love the originality and individuality of her pieces. Her color combinations are mind-blowing and her technique is quite labor-intensive. I envision them in people's homes either crawling up on the walls or strongly defining a corner.
I love Priscila and her work. I feel that she works quote steadily towards accomplishing her goals and projects. She mixes cityscapes of her native Brazil and the massive metropolis that is New York City where she lives. Here is an older post of Priscila and I installing a piece at one of my client’s apartment.
I became familiar with his work this past December at one of the parallel fairs at Art Basel Miami Beach and was quite captivated by his large scale collages where he assembles a vast array of objects, magazine cut-outs, posters and other fragments of either his own life or the world as he sees it. The overall composition is well-accomplished and the quality of the final pieces is quite good. There is something cool and at the same time creepy about his work and I love that.
I’m obsessed with the way Marcelo uses his background in architecture and urban planning to create the most beautiful collages, objects and installations. The show that he had at the Saatchi Gallery in London last year was called Planos-Pipas (‘kite-planes’ in Portuguese) displayed gorgeous interconnected kites using tissue paper, bamboo, fiberglass and cotton thread and the result was mesmerizing and compelling.
A graffiti artist who combines several media like paper, cardboard, canvas, photography, clay and digital prints, Toz has a very distinctive style and point of view. He has created several characters that appear and reappear in his work and one of his main sources of inspiration is the city where he was born and still lives in: Rio de Janeiro.