Gui Prada’s faces don’t just look back at you—they question you. They rise from the silence
of the paper like fragments of a collapsing planet, pieces of a larger consciousness
refusing to disappear. There’s no posing here. What we see is protest, awe, memory, and
raw humanity. With fast, scratched strokes born from an urgent instinct to capture the now,
the artist delivers expressions that stir us—because they demand to be felt.
Born in Limeira, a small town in the state of São Paulo, Gui’s path has been shaped by
constant crossings—between advertising and art, between technical precision and
intuitive freedom, between urban life and the forest. Trained in advertising, with over two
decades in graphic creation, he eventually found his true ground in art. Printmaking,
graffiti, painting, and drawing have always been with him, but it was in 2005, when he
returned fully to art-making, that his visual language took full form—a language that
dares, provokes, and searches for meaning.
It was during this process that he met Iberê Camargo—and the experience left a mark.
Encountering one of the great names of 20th-century Brazilian art, in his studio in Porto
Alegre, was a turning point. Gui recalls: “Some conversations were quiet; in others, he
worked frenetically for hours. But there was always truth.” That informal relationship with
Iberê widened his understanding of gesture and urgency—an urgency that echoes in every
one of his strokes today.
To him, the Amazon is not just a landscape—it’s an open vein, a threatened organism. “To
represent and defend this organism is a task that demands both responsibility and
urgency,” he states. His gaze doesn’t romanticize the forest; he sees it as a living entity,
endangered by greed and ignored by apathy. “To what extent is my own lifestyle and
consumption contributing to the Amazon’s destruction?” he asks. The red that once evoked
urucum now appears bloodstained—a visual metaphor that runs through his palette.
Gui, with his signature directness, sums it up: “My work is simple, ordinary. Portraits. People.
Expressions. But look closely—look them in the eyes. Each one has something to say.” That
invitation is the core of his work. It’s not just about seeing—it’s about engaging. With the
faces. With the forest. With what’s missing. Everything is there, waiting for a conscious gaze.
Gui Prada’s art doesn’t soothe—it wakes. It doesn’t decorate—it disrupts. It’s gesture and
awareness. In an era of environmental urgency, growing dehumanization, and erasure of
Indigenous cultures, his work asserts itself as an act of presence. “One gesture, a scratch,
then another: de-construction. Mess on the edge of chaos. A suggestion of freedom.” From
that tension, his aesthetic emerges. And in that friction, his art takes root—as mirror,
warning, and seed.