Heberth Sobral

• “Daily life” Series

I use toys to create my artistic language, always focused on the representation of daily life. The toy, for me, is a social model; as children, we always play with what we think we will be as adults.

I approach themes of behavior, thoughts, and acts performed through a culture.

By always creating something present in everyone’s life, my idea is to bring the spectator into the artwork through a memory.

• “Tiles” Series

This work arises from a fusion between my work with Playmobil and the Portuguese culture of tiles.

In 2015, I participated in an artist residency in the ART District of Cascais in Portugal, in collaboration with the Pestana Hotel.

In my walks through the city, during the period of the artistic residency, I discovered the sophisticated art, created by the Portuguese, of using tiles to frame and give an identity to their architecture. The elegance and delicacy of the tiles add a historical and authentic coloring to the city.

I got inspired and decided to incorporate this particular form of art into my artistic process to pay homage to the city and the local culture that welcomed me so well.

In the end, we made a permanent wallpaper installation in room 26 of the Pestana Hotel.

• “Cipós” Series

When they cut our umbilical cord, we are born into the world. I created the same analogy for this series of works with the vine.

The vine is the umbilical cord of nature, and when I cut it from the forest, my work is born.

From then on, they will be unique pieces like all the individuals on earth.

The piece represents only itself, and it begins and ends in itself, and it does not represent or mean anything outside of itself.

Something new emerges there that represents itself, with its own identity. I look for the reference for the paintings in several sources: in animals, in body paintings of natives, in fabric prints, or simply from my head. I present them in loops to represent the cycle of life.

• “Windows” Series

These windows are from Muriaé, Minas Gerais, Brazil, where I was born.

One of the desires of people who live in the countryside is to have a truck to do freight and thus get to know Brazil.

To see in person what we could only watch on TV. We stared at the trucks coming and going on the road through the windows in our childhood, wishing we could go with them to other destinations.

Time passed and what made me get to know other places in Brazil and abroad was art.

The window frame represents the time of my childhood when I would stay at the window wishing to see other destinations.

The painting is a kind of window that takes you to a landscape, a trip, and it opens a breach where there is only a wall.

Using the window itself to represent the painting, I create a paradox.

With the window open, you have a wall, and when it’s closed, you have a painting that you can look at and travel.

• “Stocks” Series

It’s a series of small paintings with colors and geometric shapes. Its origin name follows the principle of an action, both in interfering in the order of the paintings and in the stock market shares.

Each square represents a fraction of the work, just like in the stock market, when the more of it is acquired, the higher the percentage of the work. The orders of the 75 works are random according to the particular taste of those who own them.

The Art market is very similar to the financial market. It is not by chance that large banking corporations have their private collections of art: these activities go together.

Some collectors acquired a work from an artist thinking about its valorization, thus increasing its patrimonial value, be it selling in the secondary market or keeping in its collection for a supposed inheritance.

Just like in the stock market, they bet on low stocks to win high or keep the stock to increase their participation in the company. The company that goes public on the stock exchange uses the capital of its shareholders to make investments in its products, the same logic serves for the artist to use the capital of a work sold to reinvest in their works.

For the construction of the visual language of the work, I use parts of the Playmobil doll, which was based on the Bauhaus philosophy of seeking simpler shapes and lines, defined by the function of the object, and along with that I sought references of geometric balance in Russian Constructivism, colors of African paintings and the symbolism of Rubem Valentim.