Michel Scherer (1987) is a visual/gustatory artist and cook. His practice crosses cuisine, object, and painting, exploring memories through projects, as well as industrialized materials such as cassava, powdered pigments, and oxides. He regularly engages in open-air painting, which he calls pintura livre ao ar livre, and in small-scale culinary production for the #slowbakinggroup.

Scherer develops studio-based series such as flores para casas em chamas, signos e mundo, melhores do ano, and flores para novos estados, as well as outdoor projects like pintura livre ao ar livre. His practice explores memory, collective trauma, and the intimacy of the home as a metaphor for existence—often beginning with the history of ingredients and materials that pass through dead bodies to become earth and then food within our bodies once more. In this way, he reflects—much like in the kitchen of the painting—on the cyclical states inherent to terrestrial experience.

Nº9 (2025) is part of the Drowned World series, which the artist has been developing since 2024. As a field of symbolic expansion, Scherer manifests hats floating over a blood-red surface that evokes both collective memory and post-battle landscapes—especially through the absence of bodies and the traces of vanished presences.

In this work, the series reaches a brutal clarity: the liquid is not water but a field between blood, mud, and paint, where life has been dissolved. The hat appears as a sign of identity that, by becoming a mere floating surface, shifts the subject into the object. A memory without a body, a testimony without a voice.

Formally, the chromatic contrast creates immediate tension, while the contours suggest flow and movement. The series operates on two levels: the first, historical and political, echoing massacres, disappearances, and violence; the second, poetic and existential, intimate and hidden—the disappearance of the human body and the endurance of symbols, as if culture survives while flesh is lost.