CAIO CRUZ
Caio Cruz (Afonso Cláudio, ES, Brazil, 1993) has lived and worked in São Paulo/SP since 2025, where he works as a visual artist and teacher of painting and drawing. Trained in Music, he transitioned into the visual arts, developing his painting practice in a self-taught manner and in Brazilian studios grounded in the techniques and methods of nineteenth-century European artistic schools. He later deepened his study of Baroque painting in the Academic Figure Painting and Portraiture course at The Florence Academy of Art, in Florence.
In his research, Caio Cruz investigates the home as a psychic territory and an architecture of memory. Drawing on autobiographical experience, his paintings weave together memory and fabulation to construct interiors that evoke states of remembrance and reverie. Recurring elements such as water, animals, everyday objects, and domestic settings become metaphors for emotional states, creating images that oscillate between the familiar and the unsettling.
Since 2013, he has developed series exploring human experience within the domestic sphere, such as Show Me Your Pain (2017), Kindergarten (2019), and The Interior of Soft Things (2023). His solo exhibitions include Show Me Your Pain (Galeria Eugênio Pacheco de Queiroz, Vila Velha, 2017) and Kindergarten (La Macchina Fissa, Mantua, 2023). He has taken part in group exhibitions such as the 8th Piracicaba Watercolor Salon and the 37th Engenheiro Julio Capobianco Fine Arts Salon (both in 2025). His work is held in the collection of the Pinacoteca Municipal Miguel Dutra (Piracicaba/SP), where he received the Acquisition Prize at the 8th Piracicaba Watercolor Salon (2025). In 2023, he completed an artist residency at La Macchina Fissa, in Italy, and received mentorship from Julie Belfer at Arte Contemporânea Vírgula, in São Paulo.
Caio Cruz (Afonso Cláudio, ES, Brazil, 1993) has lived and worked in São Paulo/SP since 2025, where he works as a visual artist and teacher of painting and drawing. Trained in Music, he transitioned into the visual arts, developing his painting practice in a self-taught manner and in Brazilian studios grounded in the techniques and methods of nineteenth-century European artistic schools. He later deepened his study of Baroque painting in the Academic Figure Painting and Portraiture course at The Florence Academy of Art, in Florence.
In his research, Caio Cruz investigates the home as a psychic territory and an architecture of memory. Drawing on autobiographical experience, his paintings weave together memory and fabulation to construct interiors that evoke states of remembrance and reverie. Recurring elements such as water, animals, everyday objects, and domestic settings become metaphors for emotional states, creating images that oscillate between the familiar and the unsettling.
Since 2013, he has developed series exploring human experience within the domestic sphere, such as Show Me Your Pain (2017), Kindergarten (2019), and The Interior of Soft Things (2023). His solo exhibitions include Show Me Your Pain (Galeria Eugênio Pacheco de Queiroz, Vila Velha, 2017) and Kindergarten (La Macchina Fissa, Mantua, 2023). He has taken part in group exhibitions such as the 8th Piracicaba Watercolor Salon and the 37th Engenheiro Julio Capobianco Fine Arts Salon (both in 2025). His work is held in the collection of the Pinacoteca Municipal Miguel Dutra (Piracicaba/SP), where he received the Acquisition Prize at the 8th Piracicaba Watercolor Salon (2025). In 2023, he completed an artist residency at La Macchina Fissa, in Italy, and received mentorship from Julie Belfer at Arte Contemporânea Vírgula, in São Paulo.
"From conversations with Caio, certain words return with the insistence of things searching for a place:
house, childhood, religion, violence, drive. Each one arrives accompanied by distinct images, materials,
formats and temperatures, running through the red of a scored maternal figure, the murky light of a
children's party, the dissolved bodies in Sacred Home in Vertigo, the green and blue waters of Small
Catastrophes, and the fragments of flooring, stone, vessel and rubble where the paint fixes itself, as if
the house, once demolished, kept producing matter for whatever remained restless. The exhibition
builds itself within this field of returns, where memory finds irregular surfaces, where childhood
reappears in pieces, where religion leaves marks of prohibition, and where violence operates as
atmosphere, noise, pressure and form even before offering itself as a scene."
Débora Duarte, in the curatorial essay for the exhibition "Retrato Interior".
Débora Duarte, in the curatorial essay for the exhibition "Retrato Interior".
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Caio Cruz (Afonso Cláudio, ES, Brasil, 1993) has lived and worked in São Paulo/SP since 2025, where he works as a visual artist and teacher of painting and drawing. Trained in Music, he transitioned into the visual arts, developing his painting practice in a self-taught manner and in Brazilian studios grounded in the techniques and methods of nineteenth-century European artistic schools. He later deepened his study of Baroque painting in the Academic Figure Painting and Portraiture course at The Florence Academy of Art, in Florence.
In his research, Caio Cruz investigates the home as a psychic territory and an architecture of memory. Drawing on autobiographical experience, his paintings weave together memory and fabulation to construct interiors that evoke states of remembrance and reverie. Recurring elements such as water, animals, everyday objects, and domestic settings become metaphors for emotional states, creating images that oscillate between the familiar and the unsettling.