Vinícius dos Santos / Enter Art Fair: Vinícius dos Santos

“I try to approach it by asking the painting what it needs. I feel that if I ask my paintings what they want, I usually get an answer.”

How does one begin to move a place that does not want to be moved? Could one, for instance, persuade a colossal mountain to relocate?

Could the pink pigment derived from the Brazilian stone rhodonite somehow carry the magical essence of another continent into a painting? What happens when it is blended with pigments derived from other herbs, gemstones and stones from the same region? Surely, their particles must leave behind an esoteric imprint.

A recurring theme in Vinícius dos Santos’s practice is his deep attachment to the landscapes of his native Brazil and the fleeting memories they hold. He explores whether a landscape can be carried with you, and whether painting can become a portal between different times, spaces and places.

The idea of capturing an ephemeral sensation of a place through paint inevitably brings to mind modernists such as Ivan Aguéli, abstract expressionists like Joan Mitchell, and contemporary painters such as Andreas Eriksson. In Santos’s paintings, however, this same sensibility is articulated through figurative interior scenes that alternate between detailed close-ups of gemstones and compositions in which a hand or fragments of the surrounding interior come into view. These emotionally charged interiors, rendered with refined attention to detail, layered ambiguity and cinematic lighting, recall both Ola Billgren’s photorealistic paintings of the 1960s and Suzannah Sinclair’s evocative interiors, such as Delores pulls back the curtains.

Santos works with paper, watercolour, ink and pigments made from stones, minerals, earth and other materials. His interest in these substances began with the story of a paternal grandmother he never met, who was known as a healer in Brazil. He wanted to work with materials that might have belonged to her world.

There is an alchemical quality to this process, but also something deliberately uncertain. The materials seem to participate in the metamorphosis themselves. When making pigments from minerals, Santos asks the stone: “Can I break you?” Sometimes the answer is yes. Some stones, he says, would rather be painted. The distinction is telling: some things are meant to be transformed, while others resist transformation. A mountain, perhaps, belongs to the latter category.

There is something here of Helen Frankenthaler’s notion that art has a will of its own: a surrendering of some authority to the work itself, allowing material, colour and chance to redirect intention. Santos’s relationship with his materials is similarly conversational. Colour has its own limits and possibilities; the painting can ask for something the artist had not anticipated.

His palette is open to transformation. Birch leaves mixed with baking soda create yellow; rhodonite produces pink; amethyst and purpurite open into purple. Minerals, earth and crystals are mixed with synthetic pigments and whatever else feels right. The studio becomes a fusion of laboratory, temple and workplace - a place where experimentation exists alongside ritual, intention alongside intuition.

Santos works mostly analogue, often making collages for his sketches from images found in books. If he encounters an image that feels as though it wants to be transformed, he may simply open a book and take the first picture he finds, “almost like picking a tarot card, but with books.” For a particularly challenging painting, he may begin with black tourmaline or dark grey kyanite, also known as witch’s broom, for good luck.

The pieces presented at Enter are bound together by an intentionally recurring palette. Olive green moves through the works, joined by blues, greens and yellows, touched with pink. Their cinematic lighting, with deep shadows and areas of almost overexposed light, further heightens their sense of suspension.

This new suite of paintings is itself the result of a return. Santos returned to images from a research trip to southern Brazil, looking again at photographs and fragments that had remained at the edges of his attention. What happens when the background becomes the foreground? When the supporting actor steps into the light?

Many of the paintings seem to enact this shift. Their concentrated lighting gives the images the quality of a stage: stones in different interior settings appear momentarily illuminated, as though waiting to be seen. In a playful yet earnest way, different parts of nature become protagonists in Santos’s inner world. During his graduation work at the Royal Institute of Art, this took the form of a fictitious love story with a mountain in Brazil. In his solo presentation at Enter, the romance returns, this time directed towards forgotten stones.

Like the practices of Christine Ödlund and Cecilia Edefalk, Santos’s work is informed by a distinctly animistic sensibility, in which materials seem to possess a life and agency of their own.

Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature contains a passage that seems to speak to this strange animation of the inanimate:

No dragons will spring from these circles. / These stones will not dance or clap hands at the solstice.

/ Beached on the shingle, / They lock up their memories, / Upright as sentinels / In the dry grass.

– Malin Ebbing, 2026

Vinícius dos Santos (b. 1987) in Novo Hamburgo, Brazil, is a Swedish/Brazilian artist, living and working between Stockholm and Eskilstuna, Sweden. He holds a BFA and MFA from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.

dos Santos works with painting, specifically water-based mediums such as watercolors and inks, often creating his own pigments from minerals and stones collected in Brazil and Sweden. In his latest works, dos Santos has explored his own connection to the idea of a place, as a person that belongs to two different countries.

By grinding stones into pigment and transforming them into images, he searches for a method of moving a place through painting. The works become acts of preservation, connecting distant geographies and layers of memory. They often arise from brief flashes of recollection, yet they are made from matter shaped over millennia.

Artwork photos by Adam Appel.

Thank you to Kulturrådet for the travel grant.