Art often finds people in unexpected ways: like a light, a phone call, or the rediscovery of a symbolic world that always exists within them. This is especially true for those who were not exposed to the arts early in life and received no formal training. Such is the case with self-taught Brazilian artist Larissa de Souza, who discovered art while working in an art store after a humble, and in many ways challenging, upbringing. “I learned about materials, techniques, and I met some artists. It was a great experience for me,” De Souza recalled, speaking to the Observer during his second solo exhibition, “Phenomenal,” on view at Albertz Benda in New York through February 14, 2026.
A raw, uninhibited sense of creative discovery animates his work and his figurative universe with great energy. In his paintings, De Souza conveys personal memories and an ever-expanding world of imagination through unfiltered experimentation with materials, colors and forms, eschewing traditional painting manuals and revealing the natural, seemingly limitless power of world-building.
De Souza grew up in a Catholic family, but his mother’s faith was not strictly doctrinal. Rather, it included a hybrid spirituality that loosely linked Catholicism with Yoruba culture and ancestral Afro-Brazilian belief systems. This layered spiritual heritage emerges clearly from the dense parallel mythopoiesis that animates his paintings, where the personal icon expands into a wider symbolic landscape shaped by Afro-Caribbean spirituality, Santería, Catholic imagery and Brazilian mythology. He explains: “I feel that this feeling of spiritual life comes from my work.
At the core of De Souza’s practice is an exploration of her experience as an Afro-Brazilian woman who is constantly dealing with memory, ancestry and femininity. Her paintings quietly reveal the power, visibility and exploitation her mother, grandmother and all the female lineage endured before her, tracing the persistence of racism and sexism in Brazilian society.
If you look closely at these works, many aspects seem to be rooted in the artist’s upbringing, appearing as pieces of personal history woven into each design. “I feel like I’m collecting pieces—moments, emotions, memories—that come together through work,” he says.
The female figures that inhabit his paintings are always connected to his family and himself. Sometimes, they act as alter egos; to others, they appear as relatives or inherited matters. “Sometimes the works come from stories that I have heard and liked, which then enter my paintings. In the end, I think that everything is part of me, filtered through memory and thoughts,” recalls De Souza.
One job in particular, Layette for a child (2025), looks directly at his mother’s experience of raising him as a single parent. “When she was pregnant with me, she went to the hospital alone. That history—its emotional violence and structure—became part of the painting. In a way, my mother is here, it’s like looking back, or thinking how my mother might have seen me or painted me.
De Souza’s paintings emerge from an urgency to seek out and process these long-repressed memories—working through generational trauma and other forms of thought. “When something happens, and it makes me uncomfortable, I feel the need to paint, it’s almost necessary. That’s what this job feels like,” he says.
The exhibition’s title comes directly from Maya Angelou’s poem “Phenomenal Woman,” which emphasizes the persistence of the dignity of existence and the assertion of feminine, matriarchal power that has long been suppressed or contained, yet remains the primary source of healing, fertility and health. “It’s fire in my eyes, and the gleam of my teeth, a swing in my loins, and joy in my feet. I am a woman, in a wonderful way,” it read. “A wonderful woman, that’s me.”
Echoing the act of assertion in the poem, painting, for De Souza, is a way of finding a place for these stories and restoring dignity to experiences that need to be remembered and respected. Her art acts as a portal, connecting her to the women who came before her and the matriarchal lineage that continues to shape her sense of self.
In his new works, De Souza uses an increasingly multi-material approach, freely combining acrylic and oil with collage, fabric, found objects, embroidery and resin frames. Raised objects and textures move between image and object, collapsing the distinction between painting, art and composition. “It feels close to the artwork, which I enjoy,” he says. “I like to go to different stores—not just art stores, but hardware and building stores—to find materials. The act of constructing images from layered materials becomes a form of collective perception, guided by intuition rather than predetermined results.
His visual language carries a distinctly archetypal quality, where personal expression opens up timeless symbolic forms. De Souza maintains that his process is largely intuitive: he begins with a spontaneous drawing, allowing the figures to gradually emerge and assert their agency until they shape the painting’s narrative and symbolic structure. His figures often appear suspended in a fixed position, moving between the mundane and the unconscious, between the living reality and the great magic, the inner realm.
Magic works at work—but not as an escape or a mystery divorced from reality. Rather, it is the power of imagination itself, the human power to create, reorganize and envision worlds that transcend trauma and obstacles. “I’m talking about magic, but not magic as something mysterious or foreign,” De Souza explained. “It’s the kind of magic that people create for themselves. The magic that we create, that we shape and that we live in.” His work thrives within this tension—between thinking and believing, imagining and thinking—and within the dynamic assumptions of how others look, interpret and give meaning.
In Anyway, I’m getting up (2025), a magician’s assistant is frozen in the middle of a saw, his body split between two boxes on a checkered stage. The saw floats out of the hand, the fruit spills out, and the white dove rises into the light—transforming the spectacle of manipulation and control into one of restraint, self-assertion, and transcendence.
By translating personal and generational wounds into myth through the traditional, intuitive process of image making, De Souza allows those experiences to be explored, amplified and shared. Household objects—each carrying its own history of use, care, suffering and sorrow—reinforce the sweetness of the everyday, revealing how the extraordinary can emerge from ordinary life.
Ultimately, De Souza’s painting can be understood less as self-expression than as a response to trauma-initiation—an act of reflection that emerges when traditional rites of passage are absent, disrupted or denied. Telling stories and making pictures become important acts of repair, not intended to solve the biography but to restore the soul.
His paintings serve as vessels through which human suffering is transferred to a wider symbolic space, where wounds are given meaning instead of meaning, and imagination serves as a vital force capable of restoring a broken narrative into a living myth. Each work becomes an act of repair and reimagining, emphasizing the power of art not only to bear witness but to create worlds where survival, dignity and transformation are intertwined.
Balancing memory and imagination, biography and myth, earthly experience and mythic resonance, De Souza instinctively found in art a living, mythic language of repair—capable of carrying personal and family history beyond the confines of intergenerational trauma. His paintings do not seek to be resolved as meaning, transforming lived experience into shared symbols that resonate across generations. In this sense, his work engages in the deep work of fiction—retrieving individual stories into the larger patterns of the human journey, allowing pain, endurance and imagination a place within a wider, unified cosmic.
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