Brazilian artist Rafael Silveira builds a world of playful dissonance, where a horizon can stand in for a mouth and flowers might double as eyes. He describes his long-standing interest as visual synonymies, likened to formal correspondences between seemingly unrelated things, moments in which one image unexpectedly recognizes itself in another.
Visual synonymies, from tavola centinata to the popsicle
Silveiras surreal paintings replace facial features with landforms, flora, and fauna, and at times hybridize animals, figures, and objects. The artist juxtaposes elements in unlikely situationsa man with a tree for a head, or ice cream cones floating planet-like in a starry skyto probe how perception shifts when the same shape accrues wildly different associations. One historical form in particular, the tavola centinataa canvas or relief with a squared base and rounded top, common in Gothic and early Renaissance paintingsshares its silhouette with a classic popsicle.
For Silveira, that overlap is more than a visual pun. The connection is at once surprising and inevitable. One belongs to the sacred history of painting; the other to the realm of the ephemeral, the popular, the sweet, the melting. Bringing them together creates a bridge between devotional form and unstable matter, between permanence and disappearance, between the spiritual weight of the altarpiece and the fragile delight of something destined to dissolve, he says.
Popsicledelic Trip in Los Angeles
Works seen here were recently included in Silveiras solo exhibition Popsicledelic Trip at KP Projects Gallery in Los Angeles, presented alongside a show by Silveiras wife, the artist Fl e1via Itiber ea. A series of vertical pieces with ornate, hand-carved wooden frames echo the silhouette of popsicles, while figures clutch oversized frozen treats in a stylistic nod to religious art during the Renaissance.
Selected 2026 works and details:
- Surprise (2026), oil painting on canvas, 80 x 100 centimeters
- Exit (2026), oil painting on canvas, 150 x 100 centimeters
- We Are On the Same Page (2026), oil painting on handcrafted wood panel, 25 x 58 centimeters
- Wonders of Human Nature (2026), oil painting on canvas, 80 x 100 centimeters
- My God Is the Sun (2026), oil painting on hand-carved wood panel, 40 x 90 centimeters
- Early Bird (2026), oil painting on canvas, 80 x 100 centimeters
- Cosmic Bioma (2026), oil painting on canvas, 80 x 100 centimeters
- The Epiphany (2026), oil painting on hand-carved wood panel, 50 x 105 centimeters
- Multiverse Is My Backyard (2026), oil painting on hand-carved wood panel, 50 x 105 centimeters
In Silveiras hands, devotional silhouettes and everyday sweets cohabit a single frame, insisting that the sacred and the ephemeral not only rhyme, but resonate. See more of the artists work on Instagram.
