Samara Paiva investigates, through painting, the possibilities of the body in relation to certain emotional states and to intimate, domestic spaces. Her paintings depict figures in moments of withdrawal and vulnerability, in compositions that evoke both emotional and subjective dimensions as well as broader social reflections. While rooted in figuration, her work constructs distinct atmospheres — marked by low contrast, shadows, haze, and a subtle flickering of the image — that imbue each scene with narrative density and a magnetic presence. In this oscillation between the tangible and the unseen, between the figure and suggestion, the artist’s work opens space for forms of fabulation that expand the experience of the bodies it portrays.

Intimacy is one of the central axes of her practice, understood not as withdrawal but as a space for self-making, care, and self-preservation. In her paintings, the domestic environment ceases to function as a mere backdrop and instead becomes an extension of the inner states of the bodies it shelters. This same interest runs through her still lifes, in which everyday objects, traces of consumption, and personal habits operate as indices of subjectivity, suggesting identities revealed less through the presence of a figure than through the marks that figure leaves behind in space.

Working from figuration, Paiva has developed a painterly language defined by restrained contrasts and a palette of earthy, darkened tones that draws the body and its surroundings into close proximity, dissolving the boundaries
between them. The materiality of paint functions less as a means of describing reality than as a sensorial structure capable of sustaining atmospheres of suspension and permanence, shifting the image away from the logic of the event toward a realm in which duration becomes the primary experience. Rather than directing the viewer’s gaze, her paintings hold it, inviting the spectator to inhabit a slowed sense of time in which presence, memory, and space are mutually constituted.

She has held the solo exhibitions Habitual, Claraboia, São Paulo, Brazil (2026); Dark in Darkness, Gaby Vera Fine Arts, Madrid, Spain (2025); Retratos de um espaço tempo, Casa do Benin, Salvador, Brazil (2024); and Dançar no sol e descansar na lua, Nonada, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2024). She participated in group exhibitions such as Scene, New York Life Gallery, New York, USA (2026); Wet Pain, Turf Projects, Croydon, UK (2025); Pequenas pinturas III, Auroras, São Paulo, Brazil (2025); Dos Brasis, Sesc Quitandinha, Petrópolis, Brazil (2024–2025); Nem só de corpo veste a alma, Tropigalpão, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2024); Aeroporto, Castiglioni, São Paulo, Brazil (2024); Pipoca, Nonada, Salvador, Brazil (2024); Caos primordial, Nonada, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2023–2024); Dos Brasis, Sesc Belenzinho, São Paulo, Brazil (2023–2024) and Do vôo às narinas respirar, braços largos, mensagens ao vento, São Paulo, Brazil (2023). Paiva participated in the Pivô Arte e Pesquisa residency in São Paulo, Brazil (2023) and the Angola Air residency in Luanda, Angola (2026).