Paula Marcondes

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Paula is a São Paulo native and a citizen of the world. Her life unfolds between São Paulo, her hometown and the city of her heart; Singapore, where she has taught communication courses to international companies for thirty years; England, where her children live; and Montana, in the United States, where her husband lives.

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Her international life began in the nineties when she went to Australia for a friend’s wedding. From there she moved to Asia, where her son was born in Singapore in 2002 and her daughter in South Korea in 2006, remaining there for many years, working in law and later founding her company specialising in communication courses.

 

After losing her mother during the pandemic, from whom she was unable to say goodbye, and with her children settled in their studies, Paula established her studio in São Paulo, in the apartment where she also lives when she is in the city. Several works are dedicated to her mother, a landscape designer who implemented a Burle Marx project at FIESP.

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Paula’s artistic practice began in 1995 at LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore, where she dedicated herself to painting. She later studied photography with Tom White and multimedia painting with Patricia Cabaleiro. She began to commit more deeply to her artistic production after losing her mother, as a way of expressing her anguish. At the same time, her communication training business grew. The artist emerged in the midst of her mother’s death, the pandemic, breast cancer, and success in a field that brought her financial rewards but did not satisfy her fully.

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Rooted in international Pop art, Paula’s works move between photography, painting, collage, object, and installation. Just as Pop artists in the sixties and seventies drew inspiration from the comics of their era, the artist gathers references from her childhood at the rigorous German school Porto Seguro: Brazilian comics from the 1980s with characters such as Mônica and Cebolinha, Astérix and Obélix, Calvin, and others, alongside an early life immersed in art through her mother.

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Her works, constructed from found objects such as computer and mobile phone screens, circuit boards, and other materials collected from the rubbish of São Paulo, particularly in areas where Asian traders concentrate, raise questions of sustainability, communication, memory, and the body. If the heart was the organ most present in her works in recent years, the navel — the scar left after the cutting of the umbilical cord that connects mother to foetus — appears in her most recent production. The ironic titles Chess, Hide-and-seek, and Domino geim evoke the humorous works of Nelson Leirner and Marcel Duchamp.

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Her poetics unite international references such as Robert Rauschenberg, Jim Dine, and Cornelia Parker with Brazilian culture: rice and beans, Brazilian resin, the kites so present in the peripheries and beaches of Brazil, and the Brazilian instinct for assembling and joining things.

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As the artist herself says: “My work emerges from a gesture of listening and remaking meaning. In times of hyperconnection and excess, I invite the viewer to look at what has been discarded — not only materials but experiences, affections, memories. Unused mobile phone screens, fragments of everyday digital life, become sensitive surfaces of a poetics that crosses object, image, and space. My research is anchored in the themes of consciousness, connection, disconnection, and healing, proposing a path that does not seek ready answers but the activation of the field of doubt, presence, and the possible. Moving between languages such as installation, painting, photography, and video, I seek to build a practice that is at once material and meditative — an invitation to see what still pulses in the leftovers of the world.”

 

Paula’s work reflects a life full of dichotomies: living between West and East, being Brazilian while inhabiting other cultures, living between city and nature, between the digital and the analogue, between consumption and sustainability.

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Rejane Cintrão

2025