Tile patterns; religious imagery and altars from Portuguese churches; cuttings of works from the National Museum of Ancient Art; photographs of neoclassical windows in Lisbon’s streets and buildings; the Carmo ruins; Brotéria’s 16th-century stairway; a postcard featuring a Titian painting; (…) these are some of the varied fragments of images, hues, motifs, and textures that fill the walls of Júlia Pereira’s studio in Lisbon. Portuguese snippets captured by the artist, visuals she photographs and collects, sustaining and inspiring her through a persistent interplay of distinct timelines, recollections, images, and shapes that endure beyond space and time. Despite the ambiguous quality of the photographs that Júlia arranges and displays on her studio walls, we can discern in them the dual aspect, tonal contrasts, and formal hints that pervade her painting, where the question of the body, flesh, and the impermanence of time act as the driving force.

Júlia’s explorations of graphic, expressionist, chromatic, and structural elements, together with the international scope of her output, captured the attention of American curator and art consultant Simon Watson and of Xavier Auza during a visit to her São Paulo studio in August 2024. Determined to facilitate her first overseas residency at LUZ_AIR Lisboa, they challenged her to create ten canvases that evolved into Horizonte Desejante, compositions that hover on the boundary between abstraction and figuration, evoking languid landscapes and examining the intangible nature of time, its influence on pulsating bodies, and its effects on emotional ties[1].

We meet with Júlia Pereira in the concluding stage of her two-month residency in Lisbon (February and March of 2025) to discuss her interests, path, and the city’s influence on her creative momentum, as well as on the fresh works she produced during her stay. We also address her assessment of her experience in Portugal and the future repercussions it may have on her career and artistry, in a phase she characterizes as a chance to begin a new chapter in my trajectory, now on an international level. An opportunity.

Amid the painter’s canvases exhibited on the walls of various rooms, we notice in the studio the photographs that serve as reference points, the many paper studies pinned to surfaces, in addition to more recent works and others still unfinished, spread across the floor with brushes, paints, and oil pastels. In this sphere of research and practice, we are drawn in by the colours, the vigorous brushstrokes, and the manual, gestural lines that convey the creator’s constant physical involvement. Painting from the ground sets up a bodily rapport of movement and closeness with the surface, forming a convergence between two entities, hers and the painting, beyond control or perspective, guided instead by the contingency she seeks in her materials and gestures, which she describes as a clash between her will and the paint’s will. On this topic, she highlights the connection between head and hand, heart and hand, likening her mark-making to a seismographic record:

(…) I realised that the more I became aware of how my body responded to the paintings or to the memories I recalled and then attempted to paint, I would often notice a certain vibration that manifested in the brush in a very subtle but deeply connected way to what was happening inside. The idea I was perceiving was what I tried to record with my hand, even if it was initially incomprehensible. The bodily dimension, the bond, lies there in the hand, the final bridge between the psyche and the external world.

A distinct process of bodily resonance can be observed in four works produced between December 2024 and January 2025 in São Paulo. Serving as introductory notes and creating a connection with the body of work she developed in Lisbon, they help contextualise the artistic and creative practice of Júlia Pereira. In these pieces, we recognise the physical and psychological engagement of the painting act, the constant tension between the intention to capture memories and affective experiences through gestures and bodily movement. The swift, expressive brushstrokes accumulate on the surface of the canvases in images whose visceral and turbulent nature, advancing steadily towards abstraction, evokes sensations of impermanence and dynamism. The chromatic palette stands out with its multiple gradations of greens, pinks, reds and browns, earthy and flesh-like tones that once again suggest the presence of the body. The dominance and intensity of a wine-like colour, reminiscent of blood, simultaneously conveys life and death in works such as Wild promises (2024) and Matéria, memória (2024). That hue, so compelling to the artist and inviting one to partake of it, recalls a passage from Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Love on love and desire, revealing a play of dualities that interests her and runs through her work.

While exploring new pictorial avenues, the pieces created during her Lisbon residency reveal formal and chromatic hints that set them apart from earlier works. Reflecting the artist’s first visual, sensory and emotional contact with the Portuguese capital, the painting Primeira Luz (2025) displays, in its choice of colours and in the brightness and intensity of the light, the influence of Lisbon. Translating onto the canvas what had begun to reverberate within her in a form of bodily resonance that records her initial encounter with the city, the colours erupt viscerally in the painting. We see gradations of pink, green and a barely-there watery blue, almost white, that heighten the luminosity of the scene. These are colours drawn from emotive and symbolic places, poetic impressions of memories and surroundings, but also concrete experiences such as the clarity of Lisbon’s sky. In a space that negotiates abstraction and figuration, which she had already been exploring in São Paulo, we notice a certain lightness, softness and flow in the artwork, seemingly taking shape on its own, in compositions such as Miradouro (2025), where the interplay between figure and ground, between shapes or formal gestures, is explored by the artist.

The dual nature of her practice, in a confrontation and dialogue between delicacy/aggressiveness, form/disfigurement, fullness/void and life/death, takes on a fresh dimension in Anunciação, the first diptych she has produced. Reflecting and expanding on the notion of a pair, a theme she plans to investigate further, inspired by Cais das Colunas and the idea of two elements that suggest balance, Anunciação (2025) delves into issues of symmetry, order and religiosity. Influenced by the tile art found across the city, by its decorative expression and architectural role in both secular and sacred buildings, by the richness of ceramic painting and by the geometric reconfiguration of spaces through variations of decorative modules, the diptych Anunciação draws attention through an accumulation of forms and dense painterly layers that, when joined across the two canvases, appear to conjure an altar or a religious figure. The persistence of images and shapes as living entities that traverse time is also mentioned by the artist, who identifies formal parallels between Anunciação and the stone cascade in Museu de Água das Amoreiras, which she visited after completing the diptych, reaffirming the blend of memory and reality as something that captivates her.

In formal contrast to previous pieces, What Has Been Still Is (2025) stands out for the presence that a gesture can retain or suggest, its lightness, intimation of emptiness and use of beige and pastel shades. Worth highlighting are two large-scale paintings, A Chegada and Percebo-te (2025), which began on the floor. In these, we notice a fluidity of lines that, more liberated and uncontrolled (something Júlia admits is a consequence of Lisbon), emerge in panoramas where the brilliance and brightness of greens and blues are particularly striking.

After unveiling the new body of work created in Portugal at the LUZ AIR Open Studio, on March 1, 2025, the artist has planned additional projects and exhibitions in Brazil. The paintings Percebo-te and Fatalista will feature in April in the group show No tempo das subtilezas (at the ArteFASAM and MAMUTE galleries in São Paulo), curated by Giulia França. A Chegada will be displayed at SP-Arte (Pavilhão da Bienal), and on April 5 there will be a private viewing of the artist’s recent pieces at LUZ_AIR São Paulo. In August, at Museu da Casa Brasileira, Júlia will contribute to another group show, presenting a large-scale mural painting in her first experience working off the canvas. These are opportunities to discover her work, for whom the longing for colour, the transience of time, recollections, and a fascination with the body drive an artistic practice whose stay in Lisbon sowed fresh formal and stylistic possibilities and promises future challenges.

[1] WATSON, Simon – Horizonte Desejante, 2024.