Beatrice Arraes

Beatrice Arraes’ practice is primarily based on oil painting on canvas or wood. Whether depicting natural or urban landscapes, the images she creates are connected to memory and the interior realm.

Her work amasses mnemonic gestures by incorporating fragments of hand-painted storefronts, lettering, signs, and posters, practices that seem to resist the passage of time and technological advancement. This temporal mismatch, caused by the archaic aspect of popular visual culture, is supplemented by the fragile process of trying to retain the world as an image through painting.

The techniques employed by Arraes, such as developing contrasts by overlapping and then removing coats of paint, or the incisions made in the wood’s surface, unveil the different moments that form the image. They can be interpreted as a type of archaeological prospection or excavation.

Her works take form through a constant negotiation: between time, experience and memory, clarity and blurriness, as well as through the reinstatement of the dynamics of the environments she observes.

Beatrice Arraes holds a Bachelor’s degree in Design from the Universidade Federal do Ceará, in Fortaleza, Brazil, and has also studied Fine Arts at the Universidad de Salamanca, in Spain. Among her group shows are, in 2024, Surge et veni, at Millan, O nordeste não é só um lugar, at Casa Gabriel, São Paulo, and, in the previous year, Máscara, maré, memória, at Lima Galeria, in São Luís. Arraes held her first solo exhibition, Passou uma nuvem, at the Galeria Leonardo Leal in Fortaleza in 2023. Her work is featured in the collection of the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro.