Claudio Souza

The surrealist painter Cláudio Souza Pinto, born in 1954, in the city of São Paulo, graduated in industrial design from Mackenzie University. At the age of 4 he began working with clay, under the direction of his uncle, the sculptor and painter, Bernardo Cid de Souza Pinto. In 1990 he moved to Paris to study, perfect his technique and advance his knowledge, thus developing a unique aesthetic language, with touches of poetry, humor and love, which became a success in the visual arts.
He met the French collector Alan Aouizerate, fell in love with Souza's work and invited him to exhibit at Le Bains of the Paris Opera, thus beginning his success and international recognition. The definition given to the style of Claudio Souza Pinto is unusual.

His extremely lively, but curiously disembodied characters captivate us with every detail of his brushstrokes. At first, his paintings look like a fantasy world, but the artist explains it better: “I paint the clothes of human beings, because society only values appearance. But these feelings camouflage.” For him, masks are more than fruits of creativity: “We all have different behavioral masks, which emerge depending on the occasion.” His paintings produce allegories of everyday life, stories of characters that transmit feelings only through clothing, props and objects. As if the inanimate stripped away the human being to show a living world of possible emotions beyond ourselves. It's as if we give life to everything we use.
We print our identities with an intense surreal filter that I really like, but romantic and full of the purest and most latent poetry. Souza has earned a place among the most recognized artists of contemporary art with his works exhibited in the most important art galleries in the world, where it is already part of collections such as the Abengoa Foci Foundation in Seville, Spain. And he already has one of the greatest awards that an artist can receive: he was awarded at the Izmir Biennial – Turkey. He was also awarded at the Art Fusion Gallery in Miami.