Andrea Festa presents ESTUDOS, the first solo exhibition in Italy by Brazilian painter Pedro Liñares, held at Sala Nova in Rome. The exhibition brings together a constellation of oil-on-paper works that illuminate the intimate, often unseen foundation of the artist’s practice: the study as a site of inquiry, rehearsal, and revelation.
Produced across different moments and geographies, these pieces trace the evolving vocabulary of Liñares’ painterly language. Far from preparatory footnotes, they are autonomous spaces where ideas emerge with immediacy and candor — where composition, gesture, and color unfold before certainty sets in. Created in dialogue with the daily routines of the studio, frequently alongside the priming and preparation of canvases, these works embody the fluid, instinctive thinking that precedes finished form.
Paper, for Liñares, is a thinking ground: a surface that encourages risk, looseness, quiet reflection, and sudden discovery. The studies capture a cognitive rhythm — a testing of structures, the calibration of palette, an openness to accident and improvisation. Through them, painting becomes both method and meditation, a negotiation between intuition and analysis, between the material demands of oil and the conceptual clarity it seeks to reach.
Many of the works in ESTUDOS are rooted in lived encounters and quiet observations: the spine of a nineteenth-century Parisian book; a decorative motif glimpsed in a Lisbon palace wh ile accompanying his mother; the hidden pattern on the back of a studio mirror; the daily presence of a ceramic architectural ornament outside his window; the simple floral image printed on a cushion found on his first day in a new studio; objects discovered in a Berlin workspace; metallic relics arranged on red fabric at an antique market; or frames taken from a short film the artist made in 2023. Others emerge from botanical research, including early explorations for paintings dedicated to Brazilian flora.
While some studies later evolved into large-scale paintings and were exhibited internationally, others remain singular gestures — fragments of thought that hold their finality in their beginnings. To exhibit them now means to foreground the private logic of painting: the subtle hesitations, the urgent marks, the suspended decisions, the soft acts of noticing that eventually shape a body of work.
In ESTUDOS, the studio becomes visible. The viewer steps into the artist’s internal tempo — into the slow accumulation of observation, memory, and experiment through which images take root. What unfolds is not a preview of paintings to come, but a revelation of painting in its purest state: exploratory, vulnerable, assured in its uncertainty, and deeply attuned to the quiet material life of thought.
Pedro Liñares (b. 1988, Rio de Janeiro) is a Brazilian artist living and working between Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro. Working primarily in painting, he investigates how visual information from daily life can be transformed into new meaning through the act of looking, remembering, and reorganizing images. His process begins with a series of oil studies on paper that function as both research and experimentation, later translated into layered canvases through gestures of accumulation, erasure, and reformulation. Liñares’ practice draws on personal encounters, found materials, and cultural fragments, revealing how memory operates through subtle traces rather than narrative clarity. His muted palettes, diffused light, and archaeological approach to surface evoke the fragility of time and perception. The resulting works occupy a space between observation and feeling, where the ordinary becomes a site of quiet transformation.
Sala Nova presents ESTUDOS
Pedro Liñares
21 November 2025 — 7 January 2026
Lungotevere degli Altoviti 1, Rome
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