1. Your practice runs on photography first, painting second – you stage and shoot a scene before it ever reaches the canvas. What does the camera let you do that drawing directly from life doesn't?
My paintings begin with images that chance offers me, or that I compose with chance. They aren't posed for painting, they happen. By the time I could set up an easel, they would already have disappeared. Most of what I paint comes from intimate, domestic situations, or from encounters that leave behind small traces: a body after sex, a half-eaten meal, a dirty plate, an object left in the wrong place, a sentence someone says. These are fragile arrangements that usually last only a few seconds before they dissolve. The photograph doesn't replace observation, it’s in fact the gesture that impedes that the encounter between intention and chance disappears before it can be painted. It’s like the photograph creates a delay, a possibility to remain with an image and transform it while painting: slowing it down, stretching its duration, seeing what I couldn’t see even when I photographed it.
2. You've trained in metal engraving, etching, drypoint, lithography, and photogravure alongside oil painting, and your canvases often mix oil with charcoal or beeswax. How do you decide which material a particular image needs?
I don't usually decide which material an image needs. More often, I let the same image unfold across different techniques because each one changes the way I relate to it.
My background in etching or in muralism has made me very attentive to what happens when in the encounter between body and surface, gesture and materiality: the pressure of a drypoint against aluminum, the softness of charcoal sinking into voile, the density of oil paint, the resistance of metal, the friction of the pencil on the paper fibers.
This is also where eroticism enters my practice. It isn't only represented in the image — it happens in the making, as a procedure. The repetitive movements, the pressure, the friction, the hesitation, the speed of a line, the resistance of a surface. Sometimes I feel less that I'm using different languages than that I'm trying to approach the same desire through different gestures. I'm also interested in this body-to-body with my own work.
3. "o nome disso não é fome" began with an accusation someone made about your appetite. How did that single phrase turn into twenty paintings?
That sentence stayed with me the moment I heard it. It came from someone I was in a relationship with, and it was clearly meant as an accusation, one that carried shame and guilt about my affective and sexual choices. At the same time, its connection to hunger felt impossible to ignore. It felt like a sentence carrying far more than it appeared to say, and perhaps because of that I couldn't simply reject it. I had to appropriate it, twist it, stretch it, and transform it into something else.
What began as an accusation about my appetite gradually became a way of confronting, embracing, and sustaining my own hungers. But I also realized those hungers weren't mine alone. The control of hunger has never been only about food; it has also been about disciplining desire, especially women's desire. We are taught to restrain ourselves—in our bodies, in our pleasures, in our ambitions, in our appetites. That realization opened the series toward broader questions about gender, desire, and the historical hierarchies that have shaped both representation and the practice of painting itself.
Over eight months, the works slowly understood themselves as a series. As in much of my practice, they began with photographs: fragments of what I think of as an erotic theatre of intimacy — lived moments, bodies, objects, and traces of what had just taken place. It was an intensely libidinal period in the studio, in which making paintings also became a way of reclaiming my own body and the images produced not only about it, but by it.
Painting became a way of staying with that question instead of resolving it. After all, a hunger without a name can never be satisfied.
4. You've described eroticism as a "procedure" rather than just a subject. What's the difference, for you, between painting desire and performing it as method?
When I describe eroticism as a procedure, I mean that it isn't simply what the paintings depict — it is the condition under which they are made: shapes the way I look, the way I choose images, the relationships I establish with people, materials, and with painting itself.
I'm interested in asking how a woman produces images of desire without simply reversing the visual regimes that have historically organized desire in painting. I don't think the answer is to replace one point of view with another. What interests me is a deeper reorganization of the relationships between subject and object, or what kinds of relationships become visible once feminine desire is allowed to organize the image itself.
In my work, desire doesn't simply choose an object: it attaches itself to gestures, objects, leftovers, fabrics, meals, conversations, traces of encounters. When men appear in these works, for example, they become part of a visual economy that has already been transformed by desire. So, rather than “represent” desire, I'm interested in how painting can eroticize everyday life, and even create an atmosphere, a posture, a way of seeing things, before it identifies an object. In that sense, intimacy becomes a method. It is through lived intimacy that these images emerge, and it is through painting that they continue unfolding.
5. The video performance of you eating grapes on loop, with sound design and a custom scent layer built around sandalwood, honey, and pitanga, was a new language for you. How did working with collaborators across sound, smell, and audio description change how you think about a painting practice?
Ultimately, I’m thinking about the question: how can painting enter the whole body?
As I began working with sound, scent, poetic audio description, and tactile exhibition design, I became interested in what I think of as poetic accessibility. These devices aren't there simply to fulfill technical requirements. They create additional sensory layers that deepen the experience of the work and open another space through which intimacy can be shared.
This also shifts the way I think about eroticism. If my research is concerned with desire, why should vision remain its privileged sense? By expanding painting into sound, smell, language, texture, and atmosphere, each sensory layer offers its own way of touching and of being touched. They don't explain the paintings or reinforce a single interpretation, they expand them, offering the viewer other ways to access and reimagine the work.
And about the videoperformance, it felt less like a departure from painting than another way of placing my own body at the center of image-making. It allowed me to explore different ways of constructing myself as an image, inhabiting a position that Alice Neel described so beautifully: being both the painter and the painting.
6. Alongside this erotic work, you've been developing "13 aniversários, " built from analogue family photographs and centered on grief, including the loss of your younger sister, Beatriz. How do you move between these two very different registers of intimacy in the same studio, sometimes the same week?
I think every body is inhabited by a constellation of temporalities. Desire, mourning, memory, death, childhood, sexuality, pleasure, absence — they coexist in the same body at the same time. And, not by chance, many of these experiences have historically been kept apart or silenced.
I tend to speak about different bodies of work, but in reality they keep revealing one another. Perhaps they're all part of the same investigation into intimacy, unfolding through different registers.
Both series begin with photographs. One comes from the images I make in the present; the other from images inherited from my family albums. In both cases, intimacy is what guides the photograph, and painting becomes a way of inhabiting a time that no longer exists.
Eroticism and mourning are not opposite forces. Both ask what remains after an encounter: how a body carries another body, how an image persists, and how we choose to remain with it.
For me, the studio is precisely where I discover that these experiences have never been separate. They have always been intertwined.
7. Outside the studio, you've made urban performance and street work too – drawing live across Fortaleza neighborhoods for "risco_rua_risca," producing 48 drawings over four days. What does that fast, public way of working give you that the slower oil paintings don't?
Drawing in the city is a practice that has stayed with me for years. I still carry sketchbooks with me almost every day. It's one of the strongest ways I know of experiencing drawing simultaneously as testimony, as a spatial practice, and as performance.
Unlike the slower temporality of oil painting, drawing happens quickly, almost like a note taken in the middle of an encounter. It preserves something of its original vocation: a trace, an index, a sign that something happened here. It also changes the way I inhabit public space, and perhaps I use the drawing as a tactic to make me more attentive, more permeable to what is happening around me. In that sense, drawing and performance share the same openness to the ephemeral, to chance, and to the encounter. In the end, drawing is not only about making lines. It's also about becoming one — extending yourself toward the world through the gesture of looking.
8. You've spoken about the art market's unpredictability and its effect on mental health for artists who depend on it. How do you hold that tension alongside a practice this personal and exposing?
Annie Ernaux says: “I need to write about what is alive, exposed to the danger of what is alive.” And that has consequences.
There is a real tension between such a personal practice, when you use life itself as poetic material, and the demands of the art market, especially when I work with subjects such as eroticism, sexuality, death, and grief — themes that are not always easily embraced.
Over time, I have come to understand that this choice also carries a political dimension. Every aesthetic decision reveals a position: what we choose to show, which bodies and experiences are given space, and which images produced by women are allowed to circulate. That tension makes this political dimension even clearer.
So the challenge is finding a place within the market without compromising the core of the work. It is a challenge I have chosen not to avoid.
9. You're about to begin a residency in London. What do you hope to investigate during your time there, and what kinds of conversations or exchanges do you imagine developing with the London art scene?
I think of the residency as an opportunity to displace my current investigation. My work has always emerged from lived experience, so I'm curious to discover what kinds of intimacy and desire another city might make possible. I'm interested in asking how a city (and the experience of being elsewhere) can become part of an erotic procedure of image-making.
I'm also looking forward to placing my work in dialogue with another genealogy of painting. Artists whose work is related to London, such as Tracey Emin, Paula Rego, Cecily Brown, Celia Hempton, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Celia Paul, have been important references, and I'm interested in discovering what new resonances might emerge when my work inhabits that context.
At the same time, I'm very aware that I won't be arriving only as an individual artist. One of the central motivations behind this residency is to complicate the ways Ceará — and painting produced in Ceará — is perceived elsewhere. There are still persistent imaginaries, both within Brazil and abroad, that tend to frame our production through regionalist or even colonial lenses. So, what do we paint when we paint from Ceará? I hope this experience creates an opportunity not only to transform my own work, but also to expand the conversations around the diversity and complexity of contemporary painting from Ceará.
10. Your latest solo exhibition is titled "o que pintei quando desisti de pintar" – what I painted when I gave up painting. What does that title mean, and what did you want people to find there?
what I painted when I gave up painting is also the title of a self-portrait. In it, I stand in front of the easel, holding my palette and brushes, looking directly at the viewer. The title sounds paradoxical, but that contradiction interests me.
The exhibition also marked the launch of the first monograph dedicated to my work, bringing together five years of painting, drawing and etching. Looking at those sixty works together, I realized that, despite their different subjects — portraits, nudes, still lifes, domestic scenes — they were all orbiting the same question: intimacy.
I don't think of intimacy as autobiography. My work doesn't emerge in isolation, nor does it begin with my own life alone. I understand it as part of a genealogy of women artists – painters, writers, poets who challenged established traditions in order to make their own experiences a legitimate place from which to produce images and knowledge. What interests me is intimacy as a method of approaching another person, and of producing knowledge through that encounter and the traces it leaves behind. Painting becomes the public space where those experiences can be shared.
So perhaps what I painted when I gave up painting was the most ordinary part of everyday life, the inexhaustible material of lived experience, whatever remains within reach of the hands. Or perhaps it was painting itself.
