assume vivid astro focus (AVAF) was founded by Eli Sudbrack (1968) in 2001 and is currently a duo with French artist Christophe Hamaide-Pierson (1973). AVAF works across a wide range of media, including installation, painting, drawing, video, sculpture, neon, and wallpaper. The duo often confronts entrenched cultural codes, issues of gender, and politics through an overabundance of color and form. With a career spanning two decades, AVAF has become known for immersive, sensorially charged installations that uniquely combine color and form. The profusion of color has always been a defining feature of AVAF’s work as a powerful, convergent form of communication.

Recent solo exhibitions include amarelo vento azul floral (as cores se acumulam em sua atmosfera tecendo luz), Casa Triângulo, São Paulo (2023); Alterações Vividas Absolutamente Fantasiosas, Sesc Avenida Paulista, São Paulo (2023); Bona to vada your dolly bold eek, Lamb Arts, London (2022); Hairy What? Hairy How?, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York (2021); and I want, I want (angry voices angel faces), Galerie Hussenot, Paris (2020).

Ghetto foot stepping on boob dick snake (2013) was created in the early days of Pivô, when Fernanda Brenner invited AVAF to use the space as a studio. There they produced paintings for the exhibition Alisabel Viril Apagão Fenomenal, dedicated to São Paulo. The idea was to address the rampant real estate speculation taking place in the city at the time, particularly in the Baixo Augusta area a traditional bohemian neighborhood with a strong queer presence—which was undergoing gentrification, with old townhouses being demolished to make way for huge mirrored buildings, new constructions entirely disconnected from the local context.

Aiming to speak about the erosion of the city’s original identity, as well as of its diverse populations, AVAF produced a series of paintings depicting deconstructed (yet resilient and combative) trans bodies, marked by the violence of a city without planning that routinely oppresses queer and other marginalized communities in an attempt to “sanitize” neighborhoods with real estate potential.