Adeildo Leite

“I started drawing as a child. My mother says I went around the house with a notebook and pencil, drawing everything — the rooms, the visitors who arrived — and I loved reading comics and copying the drawings I liked best. Later, when I went to university and took art history classes, that was when the artist in me really woke up. That is where my great influences came from: I fell in love with Pop Art, German Expressionism and Neo-Expressionism — Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Hamilton, Basquiat, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Chagall, Francis Bacon, among others. Today my inspiration comes mostly from advertising and fashion, I think because I worked for more than twelve years in advertising agencies. I like to discuss the subjectivity of the postmodern individual — fragmented, restless — and I also end up putting out some of my own anguish. I think my painting and drawing can be seen as a way of purging certain feelings.”