Juliana dos Santos’s research is driven by a desire to challenge limiting Eurocentric traditions about perception and representation through the exploration of sensory expansions using the colour blue. Associated with states of elevation, beauty, and intangibility in certain cultural contexts, blue is present in the artist’s work through complex stages of processing the Clitoria ternatea flower, cultivated by a family from São Félix— Nilton Cesar and Edilene Costa de Jesus dos Santos—in the Recôncavo Baiano, with whom she has collaborated for years. These processes are analogous to the traditions of indigo and textile dyeing in Africa, or even the history of the blues, the musical manifestation of the Black experience in the US. Just as immateriality and impermanence are fundamental to dos Santos, the blue note is central to the blues: its dissonant note, considered ‘out of tune’ in the pentatonic scale, is purposely used to amplify the emotion and expressiveness of the music. Dos Santos experiments with the manifestation of aqueous language by blowing granules of roasted and ground flowers onto a moist plane (paper or canvas), which absorbs them. Although they retain the gesture of the artist, this blue topography is also formed by the pulverized flower itself and the winds that distribute them across the canvas. In this way, the flower not only plays a colourful role in service of the artist’s plastic desires but also has a pictorial autonomy. In this work, she collaborates with her mother, Eliana de Oliveira, who, for years, has developed complex patchwork designs in the construction of textile patterns. The union of different fabrics follows her mother’s interest in applied mathematics, guiding rhythms, and compositions close to Euclidean logics that contrast with the botanical geometries proposed by dos Santos.

WORK IN THE EXHIBITION:

10 sul do Sul from the series sopro, aragem, viração (2026), watercolour and Clitoria ternatea flower on cotton, 240 × 400 cm. Courtesy of Studio Juliana dos Santos