Paula Querido's A Travessia opens with a rustle of fronds as your eye settles on a pale green basin, its skittering reflections hemmed in by banks of rust and cinnabar, a wind-pruned canopy fanning overhead. No firm topography for the brain to file under inlet. Instead, it's the shimmer off water at high noon — and the vicarious cool of wading in — that gets you first. Nothing about the palette should feel this humid. Rust, cinnabar and pockets of plum ought to dry the scene out, yet the landscape remains sopped in the dense, dripping hush of the understory. Querido paints temperature before she paints form, laying down a wet-on-wet haze before you've caught up with the treetops, waders, and ricochets. "Wetness," she says, "might be recurrent."
Brazilian-born and New York–based, Paula Querido lets color wander off its local assignments, dredging up sensations before the picture settles into view. "Color really is one of the most important parts of painting for me. I find one of the most exciting experiences to be the continuous attempt to use it until it hits a desired sensation." As she puts it, "Color relationships are so mysterious and can incite unexpected feelings. It really is about traveling through literal feelings of warmth and coolness."
Paula Querido, Rio Santa Fé, 2025, oil on canvas, 12 × 16 in © Photo by MAMA Projects (left/top) ; A Dança, 2025, oil on linen, 17.7 × 13.8 in © Photo by Serena Schettino/Lacatena Fine Arts (right/bottom).
Rio Santa Fé hinges on a similar perceptual sleight of hand. A lilac sky blushed pink hangs over a lake of oxblood — its rim warming to burnt orange. The grass cools into mint, the particular cool of bare feet pressing into damp lawn. Even the foliage, treated with the same loose economy as the child lugging an inflatable ring under one arm or the boy sizing up the jump from a vine, never forfeits the scene's physical immediacy. Idleness is the main event of an afternoon when outwardly nothing happens.
This isn't a trick tied to midday heat. Nor is it confined to Querido's waterside chronicles. In A Dança, revelers melt into a jubilant blur of raised arms and hips caught mid-sway, the lift of it all settling in before the crowd itself. Arcos noturnos extends the same principle after dark. Three yellow arches punctuate a canvas otherwise built from violet and persimmon. Inside each, a tangle of figures steeped in the same wet, undifferentiated paint that made A Travessia's inlet wadeable. There's no moon to account for the night, no band in sight. Querido's arches could be doorways, the ribbed interior of a whale, or a chapel. By then, you’ve already cued up Toquinho and Jorge Ben Jor's Carolina, Carol Bela.
"Music is a huge part of my life and my studio time. The paintings are directly influenced by the sounds I am listening to at the time." Color and form, for Querido, obey the same musical logic. "It's the back and forth between harmonies, incongruence, surprise, collectivity, tradition, and novel breakthroughs." Music isn't painting's accompaniment so much as its nearest equivalent — or rather, "the closest thing to painting," in her opinion. "It similarly relies on improvisation, observation, listening, visceral sensation, while bringing forth lived experience — a library of sounds you've heard, like images you've seen."
Portrait of Paula Querido © Photo by Dondre Stuetley.
Sensation takes precedence over coordinates. Looking at Querido's paintings, you never think, I've been here before. Instead, you recognize the hour. The warmth. Your own wet lawn. We rarely hang on to outlines. We hang on to temperature. Querido composes microclimates before they harden into landscapes. The paintings don't describe so much as recur. Somehow, the less she pins down, the more the scene feels lived-in.