Born and raised in Senador Camará, in the western zone of Rio de Janeiro, Tainan Cabral built his artistic practice, starting with street graffiti, which soon evolved into abstract paintings on various surfaces and materials. He brings into his work a typical popular creativity that arises from necessity, recycling, and the re-signification of materials for other purposes. A suburban intelligence, if you will, that transforms old paint cans into flower pots or small makeshift ovens for spiced peanuts, from which daily sustenance can be drawn.

Geometric shapes and symmetry, which engage with the traditions of neoconcretism and tropicalism, inscribe themselves between the divine and the mundane that coexist in this depicted environment. In the colorful seduction of lança-perfume bottles, in market crates turned into frames for the canvases in the Caixotes series, in the elements of local flora painted on pool tarps, tires, market bags, and a color palette borrowed from cleaning products. Ordinary objects are reappropriated to establish an electrifying vision of this energy from a sertão that reinvents itself daily.