ABSTRACTION AND TIME: JULIANA DOS SANTOS DEBUTS WOMAN ARTISTS RESIDENCY IN SÃO PAULO

Pinacoteca de São Paulo, a museum under the Secretariat of Culture, Creative Economy, and Industry of the State of São Paulo, joined forces with CHANEL to launch an annual residency program dedicated to amplifying and showcasing the creative trajectories of women artists. This new initiative debuted with acclaimed visual artist Juliana dos Santos (1987, São Paulo, Brazil), whose innovative work bridges art and education.

Each year, the residency will select an outstanding woman artist—working in any discipline or medium—offering specialized mentorship through the CHANEL Art Partners program and a platform to further develop her artistic practice. The program includes a solo exhibition at Pinacoteca, providing essential visibility and support for women’s creative voices.

Juliana dos Santos’s artistic practice is defined by her exploration of the blue pigment extracted from the Clitoria ternatea flower, which she employs as a poetic lens to approach color as a sensory experience. Her research lies at the intersection of art, history, and education, with a special focus on strategies Black artists have deployed to transcend traditional boundaries of representation.

Last august, she inaugurated Temporã, her first institutional solo exhibition, at Galeria Praça, located in the Pina Contemporânea building. Dos Santos expands on her doctoral research by incorporating plant-based pigments such as catuaba, yerba mate, and pau brasil, creating vibrant, fluid paintings that invite viewers to experience color in new ways. “Juliana dos Santos explores the boundaries of abstraction and time. Starting from the flower’s blue hue, the artist grounds her work in impermanence: the natural pigment oxidizes over time, transforming before the public’s eyes. Her work is, therefore, dynamic and performative: she sows the color onto the pictorial surface, and it follows its own unpredictable path, like a river that flows and empties into an ocean of possibilities,” explains curator Lorraine Mendes.

Dos Santos is also participating in the 36th São Paulo Biennial with a virtual reality (VR) work that similarly explores the spiritual symbolism of natural pigments. This piece is part of the biennial’s new Apparitions program, which brings VR projects beyond the main exhibition building and into other spaces.

Juliana dos Santos is a visual artist with a master’s degree in art/education and a PhD in Arts from the Instituto de Artes of Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). She has participated in group exhibitions with works in installation, video, painting, performance, photography, and multimedia. As an artist-in-residence, she taught in the Contextual Painting department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria (2018). She was selected for the 2019 edition of Paço das Artes’ Temporada de Projetos. She won third place at the 16th Ubatuba Visual Arts Salon in 2020 and was featured in the 12th Abre-Alas exhibition at A Gentil Carioca Gallery (RJ). She participated in the 12th Mercosul Biennial, curated by Fabiana Lopes and Andrea Giunta. Her works are part of the collections of Pinacoteca de São Paulo and the Museu da Língua Portuguesa (SP). She has also taken part in group exhibitions such as Imagens que Não se Conformam at the Museu de Arte do Rio, the 3rd edition of Frestas – Triennial of Arts at Sesc Sorocaba, O rio é uma serpente, and Dos Brasis: Arte e Pensamento Negro 2023–2025.