Diego Mouro São Bernardo, b. 1988

Diego Mouro's work originates from the traces of Afro-diasporic ancestry to construct a poetics in which gesture, memory, and spirituality intertwine. Moving between contemporary muralism and studio painting, his practice is grounded in elements of popular daily life, traditional knowledge, and ritual practices, evoking that which resists the passage of time and remains inscribed in bodies, affections, and the celebrations of the people. Anonymous figures, flower vases, religious icons, musical groups, and elements of material culture emerge in compositions marked by a sense of suspension: as if inhabiting a dimension of their own, between appearance and dissolution, between the visible and the intangible. In his works, the pictorial gesture acts as a thread connecting the past and the present, between what was forgotten and what insists on remaining. With a sensitive palette, pictorial solutions aimed at high density, and a vocabulary that crosses regionalism, the sacred, and the popular, Diego Mouro transforms painting into a territory of reconnection and reinvention — a way of affirming the permanence of the invisible, the right to subjective complexity, and the power of symbols in motion.

His solo exhibitions include: Povoada (2023, Museu Afro Brasil Emanuel Araújo, São Paulo – Brazil) and E também as flores (2024, Mitre Galeria, Belo Horizonte – Brazil). Mouro has participated in group exhibitions such as: Mães no imaginário da arte (2023, Museu Afro Brasil, São Paulo – Brazil) and Back to the City Festival (2019, Johannesburg – South Africa).