We are pleased to announce the representation of Caio Pacela (Espírito Santo do Pinhal-SP, 1985), who lives in Niterói and works in São Gonçalo (RJ). 

With a bachelor’s degree in Painting (UFRJ), having attended free courses at EAV Parque Lage, Pacela has a twelve-year career in the visual arts and a solid background in painting and drawing, in a body of work strongly influenced by photography and which also feeds on images taken from the digital universe.

Artista em Foco

Caio Pacela

His work brings up questions of symbiosis between individual and collective subjects – and their relationships of subversion and reciprocal interference – and an exploration, sometimes metaphysical, of everyday intimacy. A painting in which the human condition takes center stage, based on anguish and the idea of exposed intimacy, in which it becomes clear how strange the other is in the face of an approach of this nature. And, when it comes to images taken from the internet, how much density the superficial can contain.

Spirituality, one of the aspects of her poetics, emerges as a field of experimentation, from which she explores its derivations: body, identity, faith, worship, offering and transcendence, with an emphasis on the intuitive and subjective nature of human relationships. 

From adolescence to the present day, Pacela has had an intensely close relationship with the evangelical church, establishing a paradoxical and borderline experience with this environment. His studio occupies one of the rooms in the building that houses the church he attends, in São Gonçalo, one of the cities with the highest concentration of evangelicals in the country.

The artist maintains a symbiotic, and sometimes conflicting, relationship with the religious community, which is reflected in his work. As curator Victor Gorgulho notes, in relation to the characters portrayed: “Caio Pacela puts us before them and them before us – they look at us, even if their eyes don’t always meet ours in a direct confrontation”.

As for the paintings in the “Exercises in Maintaining Instinct” series, Pacela uses a certain photographic realism to portray characters in unusual situations, in everyday environments such as kitchens. The intense intimacy exposed in this way acquires density and “enhances the sense of mystery present in the aura with which the artist coats ordinary situations in order to make them extraordinary”, points out Cristiane Laclau.