Metamorphosis Exhibition
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Júlio Vieira from São Paulo, Brazil
WHEREVER YOU GO, THERE YOU ARE
Júlio Vieira
Brazil, b. 1985, Osasco, São Paulo
Space is not merely a place. Permeated by the different ways people live, speak, and move through the world, space is the living fabric of community — and it is from this understanding that Júlio Vieira builds his painting practice. Working in oil on large-format canvas, he constructs what he calls metapaisagens — meta-landscapes that are neither purely abstract nor straightforwardly representational, but hybrid territories where lived experience, art history, urban memory, and cultural quotation converge on a single surface. The term meta speaks to his method: landscape within landscape, layer within layer, a painting that is always already about the act of painting itself — a homage, among others, to Hélio Oiticica’s Metaesquemas.
His compositions operate like collages and musical remixes: images drawn from his daily routes through São Paulo — botanical gardens, street signage, architectural facades — are layered alongside references from artists who form his constellation of influences, including Franz Krajberg and Antônio Dias. The result is a radically plural landscape, born of movement and mixture, refusing to resolve into a single stable view. Duality is a central axis: popular and erudite, dense and diluted, past and present coexist in the same frame — held in productive tension rather than false harmony.
For the works in this exhibition, Vieira presents two series: For All Who Planted Flowers in My Heart, dedicated entirely to Lisbon, and Rendez-vous, which draws from the urban landscapes of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Lisbon — after his artistic residency in Germany in 2025. What drew his attention were facades in demolition — the architectural wounds transformation leaves on a city’s face, spaces sharing a common colonial inheritance across distance. His own poems appear alongside inscriptions from Fernando Pessoa (“To travel is simply to exist”) and Gramsci (“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters”). These words do not illustrate the images. They inhabit them, pressing from within.
Vieira approaches his practice understanding that presence must be trained. He quotes Pasteur: “Chance only favours the prepared mind.” Music accompanies his process: Miles Davis has become the dominant voice in his studio, jazz functioning as a thermometer of production — the more hours listened, the more hours worked.
Born in Osasco, São Paulo, Vieira holds a degree in Design and has completed studies in Creative Process at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage, Rio de Janeiro. He is currently pursuing a postgraduate degree in Art, Criticism and Curatorship at PUC-SP. He has held solo exhibitions at the Centro Cultural dos Correios, Rio de Janeiro, and the Casa de Cultura do Parque, São Paulo, and has participated in group exhibitions at the Museu Afro Brasil Emanoel Araújo, the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, and the Museu de Arte do Espírito Santo. He has been nominated for the PIPA Prize and the Garimpo Prize. His work is held in public and private collections including the MNBA and FAMA Museu.
Eritage Art Gallery, Lisbon · March — June 2026
Wherever You Go, There You Are | Exhibition
