Beatrice Arraes (b. 1998, Fortaleza) practices primarily in oil painting on canvas and wood. Whether depicting natural or urban landscapes, the artist’s images engage with the terrain of memory and the inner world. Her work accumulates mnemonic gestures by incorporating fragments of storefront paintings and the labor of sign painters and poster makers—practices that seem to resist both the passage of time and technological progress. This temporal dissonance, evoked through the archaic quality of popular visual culture, is further underscored by painting’s own fragile attempt to retain the world as image. The techniques employed by the artist—such as building contrasts through the layering and subsequent removal of paint, or the incisions she carves into wood—reveal the different temporalities that compose the image, and may be understood as acts of excavation or prospecting. In this way, her works emerge through a constant negotiation between time, experience, and memory; clarity and obscurity; while also reactivating the dynamics intrinsic to the environments she observes.
Her recent solo exhibitions include Jogo de Mesa, Sea View Gallery, LA, US; and Passou uma nuvem, Galeria Leonardo Leal, Fortaleza, BR. Selected group exhibitions include Existências paralelas – acervo em (des)construção, Pinacoteca do Ceará, Fortaleza, BR; Vaquejada da Meia Noite, Almeida & Dale, SP, BR; Portals to Unwritten Time, Perrotin, PAR, FR; What are you looking for?, Société, BER, DE; Surge et veni, Millan, SP, BR; O nordeste não é só um lugar, Casa Gabriel, SP, BR; and Máscara, maré, memória, Lima Galeria, São Luís, BR. Her work is part of the collection of the National Museum of Fine Arts, Rio de Janeiro, BR.
Beatrice Arraes studied Graphic and Product Design at the Federal University of Ceará, Fortaleza, and Fine Arts at the University of Salamanca, Spain.