A practice shaped by movement and return
Paes is a Brazilian painter and musician based in Belfast, Ireland, working primarily with acrylic, oil, and oil pastel on canvas, board and paper.
Over the last five years, after moving from Recife to Lisbon, Barcelona, and now Belfast, his visual language has consolidated into something direct and unresolved.
Before focusing on painting, he spent eighteen years releasing music under his surname, and that long engagement with rhythm and repetition still informs how his images accumulate rather than unfold.
His paintings resist linear progression. They build through fragments. In recent years, Paes has exhibited in Palma de Mallorca, Barcelona, and Belfast, working with spaces including Catalyst Arts, Platform Arts, Ps2 Paragon Studios, Ineditad, Escat Gallery, and Artsy.
Figures that remain, rather than act
The figures in Paes’s paintings are often still. They sit, lean, lie awake, or face outward with expressions that resist clarity.
Bodies are simplified and flattened, held in place by deliberate fields of color rather than illusionistic depth. Faces carry most of the emotional weight, sometimes meeting the viewer, sometimes drifting just past them.
There is no overt narrative being performed or resolved.
Presence itself becomes the central condition.
When memory and the present overlap
In It looks like a nightmare but feels like a dream (2025), a bedroom splits between turquoise day and starlit night. Figures appear in different positions within the same space, fragments of the same person held together in a single image.
As Paes has described, the nightmare is not monstrous. It is the inability to distinguish memory from the present moment. The painting stays close to that instability, acknowledging fear while allowing space for recognition and self-awareness rather than resolution.
Leisure as exposure
Secrets of unfolding leisure functions as a key work within this body of paintings because it condenses their emotional register. A seated figure is surrounded by objects and partial presences, observed without confrontation.
Leisure here is not rest. It is the moment when distraction falls away and internal tensions surface. Paes has described this condition as a form of surveillance of the unconscious, a phrase that sharpens the unease embedded in the scene. The painting holds that state without attempting to soften it.
Ritual, myth, and the unconscious at work
Animals in Paes’s paintings often refuse fixed identity. They move between species, appearing part familiar, part symbolic. Landscapes suggest apocalyptic tension that dissolves into brushstroke on closer inspection. Hidden figures emerge unintentionally and remain, the unconscious asserting itself through the act of painting.
These elements draw from mythological, historical, and decolonial narratives, not as explanations but as layers that resist easy consumption. Ritual is present, but never translated into instruction.
Why this work matters
Paes’s paintings matter because they resist the pressure to clarify emotional experience into narrative or message. In a cultural moment that favors immediacy and interpretation, his work insists on ambiguity as a legitimate state.
By allowing fear, memory, affection, and social tension to coexist without hierarchy, the paintings reflect how inner life is actually lived. They create space for uncertainty without collapsing into abstraction or spectacle.
Letting the image remain intact
Paes allows his images to remain open, trusting the viewer to stay with what has not been resolved. The paintings do not ask to be decoded. They ask for attention, patience, and a willingness to sit inside emotional complexity. What emerges is not an answer, but a sustained encounter with something unfinished and real.
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As painting title, the faces are right there. Multiple women, various states of presence, a bedroom containing them all.
You can't unhear it because you're seeing what generates the need to sing it.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Paes is a Brazilian painter and musician based in Belfast, Ireland. For over 18 years he has released music under his surname, with seven albums in total. Among the most defining are Mundo Moderno and Wallace, which established his artistic identity and received significant media recognition across Brazil and Europe.
VISIT / ENGAGE
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Recognize this? Share with someone who writes songs about rooms they can't leave. Tag @munchiesartclub and tell us: what happens when language stops working?
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