Paes: Metaphysical Traffic Jams and Existential Mood Boards
If you think art is just about pretty pictures, PAES is here to ruin that for you—in the best way. His work doesn’t just sit on a wall; it presses its face against the glass and dares you to look back. A portal, a provocation, a beautifully disorienting moodboard of the human condition. (Yes, I had coffee and Camus for breakfast.)
PAES doesn’t paint so much as build—layered microuniverses stitched together from memory, ritual, politics, and spiritual debris. Neat narratives are not on offer. Instead: power, love, resilience, and the occasional slide into moral ambiguity.
His figures don’t pose—they squirm, rupture, flicker. They rebel against the frame like they’re trying to get out. Spirits, people, ghosts—it’s not always clear. That’s the point.
Take Os Mensageiros, for example. This isn’t a painting—it’s a metaphysical traffic jam. At the centre: Ogun, orisha of war, protection, and general “has it all together” energy. He’s the anchor, the spine, the one making sure everything doesn’t explode. Beside him: Pomba Gira, seductive, sovereign, maybe slutty—and absolutely unbothered. She keeps watch over the crossroads of life and death. Casual.
That tribal mask on the floor? That’s Exu’s. A gentle reminder to our spreadsheet demons that not all messages arrive via Slack—some come delivered by spirits straddling the line between the material and the divine.
And then there’s the movement. This isn’t your dead-eyed still life of slowly decaying pears. PAES paints with urgency—lines ripple, patterns convulse, colours riot in a kind of chaotic discipline (oxymoronic, sure—but it works). The whole thing hums like it’s plugged into a current we don’t have the voltage for. We are into it.
Paes’ studio sale dropped on Art Unpacked back in March 2025, but if you’re curious about available works, drop us a line at eleo@art-unpacked.com. We don’t bite.
