Rafaela Foz has a degree in Visual Arts from FAAP and is a graduate student in Artistic Practices in the same institution. Her works have been part of group exhibitions in galleries such as Zipper and Lona, and institutions such as the Museu de Arte de Ribeirão Preto and the Museu de Arte Brasileira. She was awarded the 12th Salão dos Artistas sem Galeria’s prize in 2021 and the 28th Mostra da Juventude’s prize in 2017. Between 2017 and 2020 Rafaela directed Espaço Breu, an autonomous art space in which she organized and produced several cultural projects, such as “Projeto de Fachada” and “Conversas no Breu”.
Her artistic practice has three research objects as its structural axes: temporality, everyday experience and the construction of landscape. Not always intricated, she approaches these notions through different angles through media such as video, photography, installation and performance. Rafaela explores materials and situations through their power of transformation in time and through time, giving duration an important role in her poetics.
Instead of a pragmatic collection of materials and readings, she lets herself be carried away by an idea of research and artistic production marked by temporal and procedural experiences. She understands herself as a collector of images, sensations, descriptions and concepts that, for some reason, stand out among banal experiences and manifest themselves in her as poetic potentials. With a few simple operations, she seeks at the same time to produce a suspension of the common sense of things, which in the banality of “normal” life takes on an aura of necessity and pragmatism, and to engender extraordinary experiences with these things, always aspiring to an assertive synthesis between idea and form.
Inspired by the feeling of wonder that one experiences in front of nature, Rafaela seeks to create a silent and contemplative atmosphere in her work, very influenced by the idea of Japanese gardens, whose function is to express the fragility of existence and the unstoppable advance of time through the construction of simulacra of nature. Far from aiming at a passive spectator, separated from the art object or the aesthetic experience, the artist is interested in a certain physical and intellectual immersion in it.