ArtRio 2026

Rafael Kamada’s painting is structured around the relationship between color, gesture, and space. In his canvases, references to nature — flowers, foliage, waters, and landscapes — appear in a recognizable way, but without constituting literal representations. The forms are continuously crossed by the gesture of painting, so that figure and ground, abstraction and representation, coexist on the same surface.

Color is a central element of this process. Kamada does not start from a fixed palette, but explores the different possibilities of a single tone based on the amount of paint, the transparency, and the intensity of the brushstroke. These variations cause color to stop functioning merely as fill and instead begin to construct the space of the painting. Gesture also plays a fundamental role: his brushstrokes are distributed in different directions and can vary significantly in thickness and intensity. Earlier layers remain visible at certain points, creating a relationship between what is in the foreground and what seems to recede. The surface thus concentrates different moments of the painting process and produces a perception of depth that does not depend on the traditional construction of perspective.

It is in this field that Kamada’s work moves: his paintings may suggest a landscape or a plant form, but these references do not remain stable; they dissolve and reorganize as the eye moves across the canvas. The artist builds images in which the recognition of a form is only one of the elements of a broader experience, determined by color, matter, and movement. There is, therefore, a constant tension between construction and chance. Although the canvases present a rigorous organization, this structure is not immediately evident. The artist works from the continuous response between gesture, matter, and surface, allowing the process to modify the initial plan. The result is a painting in which order and disorder do not appear as opposites, but as parts of the same system of construction. Different layers and gestures remain simultaneously present, making the painting perceived less as a fixed image and more as a field in transformation. Nature, when it appears, is not merely a theme, but a starting point for investigating how forms, colors, and different states of matter can coexist on the same surface.

At ArtRio 2026, Claraboia and Refresco present a set of works that brings together different aspects of this research. The collaboration between the two galleries brings Rafael Kamada’s production closer to the audience in Rio de Janeiro, presenting a painting that builds itself from the relationship between precision and unpredictability, recognition and dissolution, structure and movement. More than defining an image, his canvases propose an experience in which perception itself remains in process.

Pedro Scudeller, Claraboia Artistic Director