TITO TERAPIA

Terapia’s practice centers on small- and medium-format paintings that draw from both classical painting traditions and Brazilian popular art. Moving fluidly across genres fundamental to the figurative canon, such as landscape and still life, his works bring together observation and invention, merging scenes derived from lived experience with imagined environments. Through this interplay, Terapia constructs images that are at once intimate and expansive, grounded in memory while open to reinterpretation.

At the core of his practice is a deep engagement with place. His paintings often reflect the textures, rhythms, and idiosyncrasies of his community in São Paulo’s East Zone, where he lives and works. Personal recollections are interwoven with broader social narratives, resulting in compositions that preserve fragments of everyday life, be it a scene at a restaurant or a market, while quietly bearing witness to the transformations of the urban landscape.

Integral to this approach is Terapia’s use of natural pigments, which he gathers and prepares from earth collected around his home. By incorporating these materials directly into his paintings, he embeds the physical substance of the land into each work, collapsing the distance between representation and origin. The surface of the canvas becomes not only an image, but a repository of place, holding within it the material traces of the environment it evokes.

Through this process, Terapia’s work proposes a form of belonging rooted in both memory and matter. His paintings do not simply depict place; they are made of it, carrying forward the histories, presences, and subtle acts of resistance embedded within the landscape itself.