JANE RAFAELA CANDIDO
A practice of self-portraiture, recognition and interdependence.
My first self-portraits were drawn before a mirror. Though they held my features, I was never trying to secure a likeness. I was asking how much of the world could inhabit a single face—and how much of another life might be found in mine.
In a portrait, I am never alone. The person before me, the memory I carry, the one who looks back, even the room in which we meet: each changes the image. When I drew my mother in my own face, I encountered a lineage that cannot be contained within one body. When I returned to a damaged childhood photograph, one child’s particular story opened toward other experiences of exclusion, tenderness and the desire to belong.
The particular is not erased by this shared condition; it is what allows us to approach it. In Autorretrato II, the mirror became another person, and a silent encounter became the site of a self-portrait. In Pachamama, repeated faces inhabit shifting fields of spirals, unsettling the border between figure and surroundings.
I work toward images that resist the division of self from other, body from environment, intimate memory from collective life. This is not an attempt to make lives interchangeable. It is an invitation to experience how every presence contains relations—and how, by looking more carefully, we might begin to see one another within ourselves.
Self-Portrait I · 2017
Dry pastel on paper; marker on mirror. Triptych. Two drawings made while looking into a mirror reject strict likeness; a mirror completes the composition. The image is both the artist’s face and a place in which another person may recognise themselves. The work asks whether the self can ever be pictured apart from the world that forms it.
Two pastel drawings and a mirror; original triptych approximately 64 × 148.5 cm.
Self-Portrait II · 2018–2022
The self-portrait moves from the artist’s own reflection to the presence of another person. During a single, silent encounter, each sitter becomes the subject of a drawing that begins and ends in that meeting. Looking at another face becomes a way of looking inward: not to dissolve individual difference, but to discover how identity emerges through relation.
Pastel drawings, photographic reproductions, mirrors and video; variable configuration.
Mother in Self-Portrait · 2017–2019
A charcoal self-portrait unexpectedly disclosed the face of the artist’s mother. Years later, her mother sat for a new drawing as part of Autorretrato II. The three elements—daughter, mother and mirror—form an encounter across generations. The image belongs to one family while opening onto the relationships through which lives and identities take shape.
Charcoal and dry pastel on paper; mirror.
2020–2022
A damaged childhood photograph is reconstructed through image restoration and drawing. The girl in a graduation cap is the artist, yet her presence evokes other childhoods marked by longing, prescribed roles and the desire to belong. The title recalls Gonçalves Dias’s 1849 poem Marabá, whose mixed-heritage protagonist is rejected by her community. The literary reference deepens a personal inquiry into recognition and exclusion without equating the artist’s experience with that of the poem’s Indigenous figure.
Damaged family photograph, digital restoration, pastel drawing and mirror; original work approximately 41 × 110 cm.
Open Borders · 2019
Portraits and images migrate between clay, metal engraving, photography and street-poster formats. Their reproducibility makes the works available beyond a single original object. Conceived for a collective action linked to the 14th Curitiba International Biennial of Contemporary Art, the series engages questions of gender, race, silencing and empowerment. The posters retain their original Portuguese-language typography.
Photographs of sculpture and intaglio prints (mezzotint, etching and aquatint), reproduced as posters; A3.
Emerging from the Earth · 2019
Photographs of painted clay fragments reimagine the female body through gesture, movement and emergence. The body is treated neither as an ornament nor an isolated form, but as a presence shaped by fragility, strength and the possibility of renewal. Sculptural making and photographic framing share a single investigation.
Photographs of painted clay sculptures; fine-art cotton rag prints, 48 × 33 cm each.
2024-2025 · Series of freehand drawings
A face is surrounded by spirals, yet the spirals are not simply a background. They gather, disperse and cross the edges of the figure; in other works, faces repeat and share the same shifting field. The drawings ask where one life ends and its relations begin.
The title Pachamama draws on an encounter with an Andean sense of pacha as earth, space and time. These drawings are a personal meditation on interdependence, not a depiction of a specific Indigenous tradition or a claim that the spirals are its sacred symbols.
Ink on paper, with colour in one variation.
Selected photographic records of collective presentations and actions.
São Paulo & Curitiba · 2019–2020
Collective actions and exhibitions associated with the 14th Curitiba International Biennial of Contemporary Art. The project included poster-based work in São Paulo and participation in Typography: A Feminine Noun at Design Center, Curitiba.
The photographs below document the collective actions and exhibition context; they should not be read as installation views of individual works by the artist.
2019 / A HISTÓRIA OCULTOU E A CIDADE TEM PARA NOS CONTAR
2020 / TIPOGRAFIA: SUBSTANTIVO FEMININO
São Paulo · 2017
Documentation of a group exhibition in São Paulo, including a framed self-portrait by the artist.
2017 / GARE CULTURAL · SÃO PAULO
Arles, France · 2015
Je ne regrette rien, a photographic self-portrait submitted under the artist’s former name Jane Torres, was selected for presentation at Atelier des Forges during Les Rencontres d’Arles (6 July – 20 September 2015).
The general exhibition photograph provides context and does not depict the artist’s individual work installed.
2015 / MAKE YOUR SLEEVEFACE · TOTAL RECORDS · ARLES
2019–2020 ∙ Participated in What History Concealed and What the City Has to Tell Us, a collective project linked to the 14th Curitiba Biennial; work also exhibited in Typography: A Feminine Noun (2020).
2019 ∙ Armazém at Choque, group exhibition, Choque Cultural gallery, São Paulo.
2017 · Collective visual-art exhibition at Gare Cultural, São Paulo.
2015 · Artwork included through an open-participation submission to Make Your Sleeveface, presented within Total Records, Arles, France. Remote participation.
Publication · CRISPE, Juliana. Projeto Armazém. Florianópolis: Editora Caseira, 2019. ISBN 978-85-68923-67-2. Collective project publication including the artist’s contribution.
Education · Postgraduate specialisation in Art History: Theory and Criticism, Centro Universitário Belas Artes de São Paulo (2015–2017); guest enrolment in a graduate-level psychology/aesthetics course at USP (2020).
Practice · Professional photography and portraiture, drawing, printmaking, sculpture and research in aesthetic experience.