André Penteado stands out as one of the leading contemporary visual artists in Brazil, using photography as a means of investigation and reflection on history and its reverberations in the present. His work moves fluidly between documentary and conceptual approaches, exploring not only pivotal episodes in Brazilian history but also deeply personal experiences marked by emotional intensity. With a precise and methodical gaze, he constructs layered narratives that reveal how multiple versions of reality coexist, shaped by the processes of memory and erasure that underpin both historical writing and social experience.
Penteado’s projects unfold over several years of research and draw from disciplines such as micro-history, sociology, and psychology. In his practice, photography takes on an archaeological dimension: a tool for unearthing and reinterpreting events and memories. Visually, his images are characterized by his frequent use of flash to eliminate shadows — a strategy that highlights details that might otherwise remain unseen, reinforcing the metaphor of recovering elements often excluded from dominant historical narratives.
His interest in trauma, both individual and collective, has led to striking series such as Dad’s Suicide, in which he documents his own grieving process after his father’s death. This project expanded into I Am Not Alone, which examines grief related to suicide through portraits, empty interiors, and objects charged with emotional significance. By transforming personal experience into art, Penteado creates spaces of dialogue and belonging, challenging social taboos and inviting reflection on the relationship between image, memory, and pain.
Another central dimension of his work is the critical examination of how national identity is constructed in Brazil. Projects such as Missão Francesa explore the influence of French academic culture on Brazilian art and education — a legacy of 19th-century French artists and architects invited to establish formal art instruction in the country. Through this research, Penteado connects historical and cultural layers, engaging with paintings, architecture, and figures associated with institutions such as the Escola de Belas Artes and FAU/UFRJ (the prestigious architecture school of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro). His work questions the erasure of certain narratives and highlights the inherent ties between photography and history as ideological constructs.
His photographic investigations often materialize in photobooks, exhibitions, and installations, where the relationship between image, text, and spatial experience is carefully orchestrated to amplify narrative impact. In I Am Not Alone, for example, the book’s compact and immersive structure — deliberately designed with no visual “breathing room” — intensifies the psychological and sensorial experience of the subject matter.
Throughout his career, André Penteado has established himself as an artist who uses photography to challenge and reconstruct narratives, bringing forward marginalized stories and urgent reflections on grief, trauma, identity, and memory. His aesthetic and conceptual approach rejects the notion of photography as a neutral record, proposing instead a dialogue between documentation and subjectivity, visibility and invisibility, present and past.