Rafael Pereira. “Nkisi Kaviungo”. 2021
Oil on canvas
About the artist
Rafael Pereira, born 1986 in São Paulo. He lives and works in Caraguatatuba, São Paulo.
Since 2010 he has devoted himself exclusively to art, with painting as his principal focus. Self-taught, he developed his own language for depicting the things of the world around him, which emerge onto the canvas as a kind of emptying of the self, bringing about an encounter with a hitherto unknown self. This personal iconographic repertoire is the raw material for new narratives in his portraits, landscapes and still lifes: the artist draws on the historical weight of these classical genres of Western painting to revisit places he has been, landscapes he has observed and people he has known. In his words, a way of joining two times — past and present.
His process is spontaneous. Experimentation sets the rhythm of production, without predetermined limits or rules. The colours, chosen first, dictate the path and give form to figurative ideas that until then existed only in memory. Chromatic possibility enchants and inspires him in the search for the ideal tone, making each detail of his painting unique.