A cool breeze blows in from the wide-open windows on both sides of the artist Jonathas de Andrade’s modernist flat in Recife, a city in the northeast of Brazil. It’s June, the end of autumn in this part of the world, but it feels more like the peak of summer. “Ventilation is gold here,” he says, adding that it’s not just because of the humid and intense tropical heat of the region, but because otherwise everything would go stale and grow mold. Water hangs heavy in the air and drops without ceremony everywhere, in buckets of sweat, and sometimes as tears.
It’s no wonder that de Andrade—one of the most celebrated contemporary artists in Brazil, an art-world darling graced with survey shows across the globe, from Chicago to Paris, including a stop in Venice, where he represented Brazil in the last Biennale and premiered a new video, Knot in the Throat (2022)—renovated part of his living room to build a shower massive enough to fit a football team. “This is where I shower every morning,” he says, gesturing toward what almost appears to be a sauna, which opens onto a room where minimalist midcentury furniture is in harmony with a hammock, tables, and sculptures sourced from Indigenous artists all over the country.
This contrast is not just a detail in decor but a driving force behind de Andrade’s work in video, photography, and installations. His vision is anchored as much in the rigorous geometry of tropical modernism as to the men of Brazil’s northeast, dark-skinned, brown, Black—and beautiful, as he portrays them. Spotless right angles, he seems to suggest, have never clashed
