Eduardo Recife discovered his artistic talents early on: as a kindergartener, he says, he felt the intense need to depict every single individual leaf when drawing a treat – an urge that clearly distinguished him from his playmates. At that was moment, Recife relates, he knew his calling.


The world also caught on quickly: since the mid 1990s the Brazilian artist has worked in Belo Horizonte, where he was born in 1980, as an artist and illustrator for renowned international clients such as the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, the Guardian, and Quest Magazine.


Recife creates surrealist collages that subversively combine word and image. A painted portrait of a gold- and pearl-bedecked courtly figure looks as though it is floating above a gray tabloid on which we can make out pencil sketches. Thin red frames tumble down across the portrait sitter’s face and body. In the bottom right corner they flow into the challenge, “Change yourself.” Change yourself, also the title of the work, is a work from the series Human (2007–2009). In addition to six works from this series, LUMAS also presents six works from the series Brazil inspired.


The text is also integrated in the aesthetic as a whole beyond its semantic function in both series. “Typography fascinates me as a mixture of word and image – how could you better convey a message than through this medium?” the artist explains.


Recife’s works exude history – not only because the Brazilian often uses older fonts in his typographical design and works frequently in sepia tones but also because he understands the art of collage as a handcraft and therefore foregoes all kinds of digital techniques. Each of his works tells the story of its creation; the layers of the artistic process poetically unfold.