Tomás Brazuna Portugal, b. 2004

Tomás Brazuna is a young Portuguese artist whose practice is deeply influenced by skateboarding, surfing and the countercultural art forms associated with these cultures. He began painting as a child alongside his grandmother, discovering in art a constant means of processing emotions and exploring his identity.

His creative process is rooted in drawing, particularly through the use of sketchbooks as visual journals in which he records ideas, feelings, intuitions, fears and questions about himself, others and the world around him. Drawing is an almost obsessive practice, driven by a continuous need to explore both visual references and intuitive impulses in search of something yet unknown. This approach is closely connected to the ethos of skateboarding, where repetition, experimentation and trial and error are essential to progress. Rather than seeking a definitive or perfect result, Brazuna embraces repetition as a means of discovering new perspectives and possibilities.

Working across drawing, painting, installation and linocut, he explores the potential of images through successive variations in colour, form, composition and layering. A single image can acquire multiple meanings through its repetition and transformation, much like a skateboarder refining a movement through repeated attempts. While his drawings often emerge from spontaneous and intuitive gestures, his paintings follow a more deliberate process, developing and expanding upon ideas first explored in his sketches. In this process, painting becomes a way of completing and reinterpreting the underlying drawing.

Moving between figuration and abstraction, his work brings together expressive, often dancing bodies and symbolic elements that depart from conventional representation. Through these compositions, Brazuna seeks to give form to what remains invisible to the naked eye, drawing on collective memory, inner sensations and observations of the human experience. Although his practice is primarily two-dimensional, he uses elements from the visible world to approach the immaterial, exploring the relationship between the self, the surrounding world and the unseen.

Ultimately, his work is an ongoing process of discovery, shaped by questions of identity, perception and the ever-changing nature of existence. Rather than offering fixed answers, Brazuna creates images that invite viewers to experience, interpret and question.