Paulo Nimer Pjota: A Lua e Eu (The Moon and I)

Paulo Nimer Pjota is an artist whose large-scale works combine painting on metal sheets and raw canvas. His compositions bring together imagery from archaeology, street culture, comic books, advertising, music, and mythology through a process of visual sampling—a method he likens to that of a hip-hop producer: “If you think of the composition, you can imagine a producer, sampling and repeating to produce the beat. I do it with my pieces: I cut a part of the history and rearrange it, cut another part and rearrange it further.” These visual elements are not simply juxtaposed but held in loose, associative constellations, allowing relationships to emerge between disparate histories, images, and ideas.

Until now, Paulo’s visual language has been one of accumulation and drift. Forms appear suspended or loosely arranged across open surfaces, resisting central focus. Symbols take on a mutable presence: a moon becomes a bowl, a mask becomes a moon, a domestic object turns mythic. “I remix images out of context—images from the old world are layered with the contemporary world,” he notes. Rather than constructing fixed meanings, his works remain open and associative, responding to context and imagination alike.

His solo exhibition A Lua e Eu (The Moon and I) brings together an entirely new series of paintings, shown alongside a selection of recent works that anchor the installation in the artist’s earlier visual language. These are arranged within a large-scale mural painted directly onto the gallery walls. Just as forms in his canvases drift and cluster in loose constellations, here too the works are held in suspension, inhabiting a shared pictorial space without settling into a single narrative or centre.

The exhibition marks a subtle shift in Paulo’s work—from the urban iconography of earlier pieces to a more introspective mode of reflection. Drawing on memories of his childhood in São José do Rio Preto, a small inland city in Brazil, the new paintings explore rural and domestic interiors, plants, animals, and mysterious figures that hover between recollection and imagination. “It takes on a character of dreamlike intoxication,” he says, “where the perspectives of the paintings and their elements, like flowers and beings, blend in the pictorial plane, expressing a fantastical and spiritual thought drawn from fables and myths.”

Some compositions are constructed from earlier studies and sketchbook drawings, tracing a line back to the artist’s earliest experiences of mark-making as a child—when drawing was a way of understanding the world through curiosity and intuition. The exhibition’s title, A Lua e Eu, is borrowed from a song by Brazilian musician Cassiano, a long-standing point of reference for Paulo and a guiding note for the mood of introspection and resonance that infuses this latest body of works.

A Lua e Eu is Paulo Nimer Pjota’s first institutional solo exhibition, and his debut in the Netherlands. This project is supported by Ammodo, and by the artist’s three galleries, Mendes Wood, Maureen Paley, and Francois Ghebaly.