BRENDA
FREIRES

Brenda Freires (b. 1999, Rio de Janeiro; based in São Paulo) is a Black Brazilian visual artist who investigates the experiences of Black womanhood, using painting as her primary medium. Her compositions inhabit the threshold between memory, reality, and the imaginary, treating everyday life not as a simple record, but as fertile ground for poetic and critical reinvention.

​

Deeply rooted in Afro-Brazilian heritage and drawing resonances with ancestral cosmologies, Freires conceives dreaming beyond individual experience, establishing it as a collective territory of belonging and cosmic expansion. Within her works, human figures merge with botanical landscapes, transparencies, and fragments of contemporary visual culture. Navigating between document and invention, critical fabulation operates not as escapism, but as a political tool for subjective and historical reconstruction.

​

Fundamentally, this research addresses the insistence of life. Within a historical context shaped by structural racism, which systematically reduces Black existence to the logic of immediate survival, the ability to project tomorrow manifests as a radical act of insubordination. By painting those who persist in dreaming, the artist constructs an imaginary where the Black body moves beyond mere resistance to claim spaces of delicacy, freedom, and the full right to invention.

​

This conceptual framework directly translates into her studio process. Freires' practice relies on experimentation and material layering, articulating cyanotype, watercolor, gouache, soft pastels, and digital collage. By placing manual and technological procedures in tension, she builds sensitive, open, and unstable surfaces whose physical layers mirror the very fluidity of memory and fabulation.