Orlando Rafael
Of Dutch and Puri Indigenous descent, the Brazilian artist Orlando Rafael situates his practice within the fertile interstices of memory, philosophy and material presence. Initially trained in philosophy, literature and history, and later shaped by his formation at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage in Rio de Janeiro, Rafael unites an attentiveness to cultural tradition with the exploratory impulses of contemporary art. His work carries resonances of Eastern thought—most notably Taoist philosophy and the fluidity inherent in Asian calligraphy—yet remains firmly rooted in the soils of south-eastern Brazil.

In his Fertile Ground BR series, pigments are literally drawn from the land: earths, clays and stones combined with acrylics and resin, transfigured into colour and gesture, so that painting becomes at once testimony, embodiment and transformation. Parallel to these canvases, his three-dimensional Objects and Relics explore questions of endurance and memory, extending his inquiry into the intersections of the everyday and the sacred.

Through such processes, Rafael constructs a poetic territory in which ancestry, landscape and contemporary sensibility converge—an art that is at once anchored in the material world and open to metaphysical reflection.