Rafael Kamada’s work stands as an ongoing exercise in the investigation of his own painting. Each work is built as a negotiation between the artist’s intentions and what materializes on the plane. The painting presents itself as a pictorial event, as if the planned and the unforeseen advanced together. One action leads to the next, and decisions are continually affirmed, undone, and revised — a dialectic that structures both his process and his poetics.

A graduate in Graphic Design from Universidade Anhembi Morumbi (2015), in São Paulo, Brazil, his artistic production originates in 2019, through his practical relationship with calligraphy. From the start, his interest lay less in the meaning of words and more in the lines that make up the letters and in the bodily dimension involved in the gesture of writing.

Kamada came to understand the historical dimension of his production after attending Arnaldo de Melo’s studio, who introduced him to the abstract expressionists of the New York School, such as Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell, and Willem de Kooning. Absorbing these references broadened the horizons of his research and gave it a new density. In 2022, his trajectory gained consistency when he joined the course Painting: Practice and Reflection, taught by Paulo Pasta, which provided an environment of dialogue and praxis fundamental to refining his language. In 2024, he began attending the Art History course led by critic Rodrigo Naves, an experience essential to deepening the dialogue between his artistic practice, tradition, and the debates of contemporary painting.

The transition to oil painting, which took place in 2024, brought an internal investigation into painting’s own questions: space, color, light, form, and matter. In his most recent production, Kamada works through sedimentation, applying and removing paint in a constant process of construction and deconstruction. These operations accumulate on the surface of the canvases, producing traces of varying transparency, in which foreground and background seem to maintain a subtle, almost tangential distance, alternating with each other, suggesting a place and a time that dissolve and reorganize as the eye moves across the canvas. The threshold between abstraction and figuration is established through a chromatic play that evokes traces of the natural world. The predominant color fields structure the pictorial space and reveal a constructive method in which the painting asserts itself, ambiguously, out of absence, suggesting more than it reveals.

In painting, the artist has found a space for the exercise of subjectivity and for building an individual language, continually elaborated. His investigation, however, is not driven by a desire to reach a definitive solution, but by a willingness to operate in the terrain of unpredictability. The paintings find their measure in the experience of the present and incorporate the uncertainties that condition any projection of the future.

Rafael Kamada held the solo exhibition After a Few Seasons, Storage, New York, USA (2026); and participated in group exhibitions such as Abstract Paintings, Scroll NYC, New York, USA (2026); Morar na cor, Flexa, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2026); Ponto de mutação, Almeida & Dale, São Paulo, Brazil (2025); O silêncio da tradição: pinturas contemporâneas, Centro MariAntonia da USP, São Paulo, Brazil (2025) and Mais brincar, Refresco, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2025).