Ayla de Oliveira (1997) creates paintings that emerge from a spiritual and sensory experience deeply rooted in the traditions of umbanda. Through compositions that evoke a vast repertoire, she builds images charged with symbolism and energy, where candles, fruits, flowers, beverages, and offerings become tangible manifestations of the invisible. Her practice explores techniques such as encaustic on wood and mixtures of wax and oil, creating dense, vibrant surfaces in which color planes act as open fields in constant transformation. The pictorial matter—often applied imprecisely or as undefined masses—reinforces the notion of an image in transit: between intention and intuition, the material and the spiritual. By intertwining faith, ritual, and affection, the artist’s poetics offer itself as both icon and talisman. Her work offers a space for contemplation and reconnection, reaffirming art as a field for the expression of presence, of the sacred, and of the hidden forces that shape the world.

Orayeyeô (2019) emerges from the artist’s experimentation with encaustic, an ancient painting technique that uses heated wax as a binder for pigments, resulting in dense blocks of colored wax.

The title derives from “Ora Yê Yê Ô,” the greeting to Oxum, the orixá of freshwater, fertility, prosperity, and love. In the composition, we see a group of vases and a melon within a horizon with flowers in the upper part. There is a poetic context that suggests a sacred relationship among the elements, as the title references an Afro-Brazilian ritual practice. Yet, while the sacred act is invoked, the ritual itself is not depicted. The formal interest lies in exploring form and color, each asserting its predominance. Chromatic relationships unfold through primary and secondary colors, with yellow, blue, and green standing out against the earthy tones of the vases. In a play of planes and color fields, the lines—sometimes made with fine brushstrokes of wax, sometimes scratched with a stick—reveal the yellow ground above the wooden surface. The work tenses the poetics of the immaterial and the encaustic technique that highlights the work’s materiality.