The Colors Speak First
By Raquel Reis
Before Raquel Reis puts a single stroke of oil paint on canvas, she draws the figure in a very specific green. Phthalo green, diluted thin, almost watery. She has done this since she started painting. She cannot explain where the habit came from. If the figure feels wrong — not expressive enough, not alive — she wipes it out entirely and starts again. Same green. Always the same green. By the time the painting is finished, that undercoat is gone, buried under oil. She tries hard not to let it show through. When I asked whether its presence, even invisible, shapes the final atmosphere, she was direct: no. The green is a starting point, not a ghost.
Reis is Brazilian, based in Madrid, and has been painting for more than two decades. She works in oil on canvas and on Arches paper, a surface she handles differently from canvas — pencil first, no green undercoat, because the paper is expensive and less forgiving. Her practice is figurative and expressionist, and she has held that position consistently since her training at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage in Rio de Janeiro, one of Brazil's more serious visual arts institutions. She studied there for four years. She also holds a journalism degree from the State University of Rio de Janeiro, a fact that sits quietly in her biography without announcing itself, though her attention to observed detail — a posture, a half-turned face, a charged distance between two figures — suggests someone trained to notice before they speak.
The conversation happened in Portuguese, and Reis spoke about her process with the focused brevity of someone who has thought carefully about what she does but has little interest in theorizing it. When I asked what Parque Lage gave her, she said it taught her freedom — how to build a figure without realism, without the constraint of likeness. She was never trying to unlearn anything, she told me. The direction was always toward more freedom, not away from restriction. Figuration, for her, is not a conservative position. It is the most direct route to what she is actually after: the psychological trace of a person, not their likeness.
She switched to oil early and has stayed there. She tried acrylic, found it flat, and moved on. Oil gives the work more weight, she said — stronger, more expressive. She paints fast, which is unusual for the medium, and rarely applies a second layer. When a second layer does appear, it is for color correction, not reworking. The painting either works or it doesn't, and she tends to know quickly.
Color is where her process gets most specific. She described something that sounds less like deliberate decision-making and more like listening. "When I'm painting, the colors speak to me," she said. "I hear the color — put this one, put that one. If I don't follow exactly what my unconscious tells me, it can go wrong. So I follow my intuition. I hear the color, it comes, it has to be that one." She lets each application dry before adding the next. The surface loses a little shine in the process, oil absorbed by canvas or paper, but the shift is minor and she doesn't try to recover the gloss. Sometimes a matte finish is right. She leaves it.
The Secret (2026), oil on Arches paper, is one of the clearest demonstrations of how that restraint operates under pressure. Two figures occupy the composition in close proximity — pressed together within a relatively contained area of paper, their physical nearness the painting's central fact. Reis described how the spatial constraint shaped every color decision from the first mark. The initial colors in were black for the background and for the figures' hair, then grey assembled gradually around them. She knew from the start that the palette had to stay held back. "I had to contain the color so it wouldn't become — if the color had gotten too strong, the painting would have felt overloaded," she said. The black anchors the image; the grey gives it room to breathe. What the two figures are sharing, or hiding, is left entirely to the person standing in front of it.
Opposition (2026), also oil, works from a different premise. Where The Secret compresses, Opposition builds tension through the space between its figures rather than their closeness. Reis said the color choices were complex — more so than in most of her recent work — but that the painting itself did not give her particular difficulty. The composition held. She could not recall which color she had considered and then removed, only that the relationship between the two figures drove every decision about tone. The painting is less about what the figures are doing than about the force field between them, a psychological charge that color alone cannot carry and that gesture alone cannot explain.
Her recent work also includes The Quiet Ride (2025) and Hooded Man (2025), both oil, which continue the preoccupation with isolated or paired human presence. The hooded figure in the latter is rendered without a readable face, the identity withheld in a way that shifts attention entirely to posture and silhouette. These are not portraits. They are, as Reis has described her practice across two decades, emotional and psychological traces — what remains of a person after description has been stripped away.
That kind of self-regulation — knowing when enough is enough — runs through how she talks about finishing. She doesn't adjust at the end. She works intuitively and quickly, and by the time a painting is near completion, intervention is almost impossible. "I don't adjust anything," she said, "because it's very hard to touch a work when I'm already very far along." She steps back physically during the process, taking distance to observe, and looks at both the light and the gesture at the same time. If the light is wrong, she changes the color. She said that's difficult too.
In 2012, Reis received an arts residency scholarship from Brazil's Ministry of Culture and spent time at Maison d'Emma in Saint-Mathieu-de-Trèviers, in the south of France. It was the first time her work entered a public collection: a painting from the residency was acquired by the local city hall, where it is now exhibited alongside work by other artists who passed through the program. The work is on a wall in a building she is unlikely to visit often, and she spoke about it in those terms — plainly, without ceremony. In 2016, she received a bronze medal from the Brazilian Society of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro. Her exhibition history spans Brazil, Portugal, Italy, and Spain, with solo shows going back to 1999 at the Candido Portinari Gallery in Rio de Janeiro. Her most recent solo exhibition opened in 2026 at Casa do Brasil in Madrid, the city where she now lives and works. A group show at Occo Art Gallery in Madrid ran the same year, and in 2025 her work appeared at PasspARTout Art Gallery in Milan and at Abartium Gallery outside Barcelona.
The Madrid context matters in a practical sense. She paints in the space she has, adjusts her brush sizes to the scale of the work, uses wider brushes for backgrounds and open areas, smaller ones for confined passages. There is nothing mystical in how she describes this. The brush fits the space. The space determines the brush. When she returns to a painting after waiting for oil to dry, she goes to do other things in the meantime — she does not wait in the studio. When she comes back, she looks at the color and the figure at the same time.
What she does talk about with more care is the question of what a painting communicates once it leaves her. She said that what defines the atmosphere is what the viewer will see and feel from the painting as a whole — its expressiveness, its colors, its form — and that each person will feel it differently from how she made it or saw it, the same way each person sees the world differently. She is not troubled by this. The painting finishes when it finishes, and after that, it belongs to whoever is standing in front of it.
Human presence is the consistent subject across her work, but she is careful to separate that from portraiture. The figures in her paintings are not records of specific people. They carry psychological weight — in their posture, in how close or far they stand from each other, in what their hands do or don't do. Expressionism, for Reis, is not a style applied from the outside. It is the only language in which the thing she is trying to say can actually be said.
"When I see that the figure is well made, when it is expressive and strong enough, and when the color is a color that pleases me — that's when I know."
Discover more of Raquel Reis's work and available pieces on their Studio profile.