Pedro Neves (1997) lives in São Paulo. In his work, the artist evokes characters, festivities, rituals, spaces, and landscapes that mark his personal trajectory — between Maranhão, where he was born, and Minas Gerais, where he grew up. Ambiguous figures filled with enchantment, ancestral symbols and practices, and fragments of daily life are represented in ways that weave historical and political questions with the fabric of the intangible and immaterial. His painting investigates the bonds connecting body, territory, and belonging, affirming popular traditions and everyday practices as living forms of resistance and reinvention.

He recently took part in the 2nd Bienal das Amazônias and held the solo exhibitions Reino do Fundo, at the 34th Ocupação Program of Centro Cultural São Paulo, and Tripa, at Palácio das Artes, Belo Horizonte. He has also been an artist-in-residence at Chão, São Luís/MA, and at the 8th edition of Bolsa Pampulha (2022).

In Rastros (2024), Neves composes a scene in which the Black body, at rest and in reflection, dissolves and extends into space, between the visible and the ethereal. The seated figure seems to emerge from or dissolve into a chromatic mass pulsing between yellow, green, and deep burgundy, evoking natural and spiritual forces. Inspired by the poem Breaths by Birago Diop and by Aimé Césaire’s concept of Negritude, the artist reflects on the persistence of ancestors — not as static memory, but as living matter breathing through the elements of the earth. The painting interlaces body, ground, and atmosphere, creating a flow between the physical and the metaphysical. Here, the traces are not remnants: they are presences in continuous transformation.