Paulo Assis

Lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil

Artist statement

The artist’s practice unfolds through installations, site-specifics, and ready-mades subjected to interventions that displace their original function. Though polished and rigorous, the work always carries a fissure that shifts meaning, revealed only in interaction. The audience’s approach—through touch, curiosity, or discomfort—is constitutive, as reactions to transformed devices of control become aesthetic matter. Thus, meanings are fully constituted only through the audience’s action. By transforming everyday objects into fields of tension, the work turns ordinary structures into commentaries on power. Objects reveal relations of domination while exposing how mechanisms of control are naturalized in daily life. The rise of the far right and the persistence of subtle forms of control guide this research. Within the art circuit, where painting dominates yet marginalized voices struggle for space, the work strains forms and contents without abandoning a political gaze. The Baroque, Brazilian and Italian, serves as a reference for concealing tension beneath organized surfaces. Similarly, the objects appear normal until ruptures reveal contradictions. Christianity also appears, not as adherence but as a field where control mechanisms were consolidated and persist in secular life. The body and biopolitics cross this production. The artist’s condition as a gay, white, HIV+ undetectable man, with privileges and access to stability, structures his perspective. By intervening in...

Artwork