Reflections after my visit to Rudi Brito’s studio on 19 November 2025, by Mina Anguelova

I feel alarmed. Something from my life, a sense of destiny’s inevitability. I had not yet seen the paintings, nor did I know the name of the exhibition. Yet, once I looked at them, I realised that chance lies at the very heart of it all. A drop of paint splashed over there, a shadow was cast on the other side, one sliver remained standing, another collapsed. The hand moved with firm intention and yet blindly, orchestrating this firework of accidents that assume their roles in a theatre both intimate and epic. Coincidence is the raw material in these works by Rudi Brito. It is what energy, intention and destiny embody.

Rooms wholly absorb the presence of those who live in them, and when we enter someone’s room it is as though we gain access not only to their habits, but also to their energy. Likewise, the paintings are doors to rooms the viewer is invited to enter. Thus we inhabit matter — with the frustration of the spirit, which feels oppressed and confined within those bodily limits, while matter too laments, subdued and possessed by parasitic spirits. When we enter, we see paintings in a wooden room.

At first glance, the canvases depict ordinary rooms — bed, table, chairs. Yet as we draw closer and allow the gaze its time, we perceive what lies between the lines: the walls of the space reveal themselves like freckled skin, with the inverted hues of constellations, and figures embedded within the paintings begin to emerge.

Gradually, the vertigo of fractals and the infinite multiplicity of images take hold before us. In this abyssal journey, we discern uncanny patterns that emerge and repeat at a particular frequency. This inescapable repetition provokes a foreboding of entrapment, fatality and alarm. Perhaps the inverted world is not merely a fictional concept. The hidden world inhabits these rooms, yet remains contained within the subtleties of the ordinary world. Behind them lie the paintings of the inverted realm, where the symbol holds sway. They are the reverse of the card: the space of dreams, of night set against day, where icons, gods and demons take form and cry out their secrets.

A heavy chalice, a hypnotic, cold piece of silver. They stand out either as two queens, or as two black holes — as central and invisible as elephants in the room. Traces and erasures of light gleam like cosmic debris, orbiting and cascading back from these stars onto a darkness as empty as it is alive. And yet, before this ancestral, abyssal and tragic storm, we may discover a vanishing point — perhaps the very centre that so recently unsettled us — and from this ‘eye of the storm’, we silently behold the infinite beauty, creativity and synchrony of this spectacle. To gaze upon the rolling red heads and recognise how perfectly they set off the green of the flowers and of Neptune.