Tiago Tebet: Between You and Me, the Sun and the Moon

Tiago Tebet

Between you and me, the sun and the moon

Before any form settles, there is already a field, announcing itself as diffuse vibration. Something spreads, takes up space, moves through the body without asking to be named. Perception slows, finds its breath, and shifts into a different mode of attention. The eye gives up its search and begins to follow. A suspension sets in: everything remains in the act of appearing, as though the image were still gathering shape before us.

At Luciana Brito Galeria, Tiago Tebet’s exhibition Between You and Me, the Sun and the Moon unfolds as a system of relationships in continuous activation. Each work emits, sustains, and transforms frequencies, structuring the room as a kind of sensitive constellation, where autonomous elements enter into resonance and open up zones of intensity. Within this field, thought and image are woven together almost as a constellation, shaping an experience that keeps renewing itself in the time of looking.

The approach to this work takes the form of attention. An intensity moves through the surfaces and asserts itself as presence. Lived experience accumulates, gathers tension, and continually reorganizes itself. The eye opens out into perception – a body that feels before it recognizes, that becomes involved before it names. This same force runs continuously through Tiago’s life, binding experience and form into a single flow.

It is the body which sets this process in motion. Gesture lays down the first waves, and the memory of that movement remains active in the construction of the image, generating a continuous pulse. In the studio, each painting begins as the activation of an unstable zone and develops through accumulation, displacement, and interference. At a certain point, the work itself takes over, organizing its own internal relations while the artist sustains this field in transformation through constant attention.

There is a moment when everything slows down. The surface is no longer simply seen – it is inhabited. Small variations begin to gain density, and intensities that were almost imperceptible start to come forward. The eye moves across the surface and lingers there. As in a meditative state, the image opens out in successive layers. Time dilates, and what appears refuses to settle into place; it continues.

The painting sets the visible into vibration. The surface is presented as a zone of incidences where density and openness coexist, drawing the eye through an experience of duration. The works gather themselves as constellations, in which each element holds onto its singularity even as it enters into relation with the others. Bodies and landscapes emerge as presences in transit, inhabiting an in-between space where the visible becomes energetic experience. Each work activates its own register, organizing perception as vibration.

In Tiago’s paintings, two forms of presence emerge, each organizing experience in a distinct way. In some works, beings appear as condensations of energy – figures almost in the act of taking shape, eyes, centers of attention that float across the surface and seem to capture, emit, and hold. These bodies without stable contours establish the presence of an entity, an apparition, a force that offers itself as intensity.

Faceless eyes appear as devices of attention, and the image itself seems to look back. The ocular motif multiplies and bleeds into its surroundings, until seeing becomes nearly indistinguishable from being seen. This painting holds a question open and activates a space of thought, where the figure insists as emergence – almost a face, almost an organ of perception. What asserts itself is a topology of forces: circular nuclei, chromatic vapors, small eruptions of brightness poised between formation and dissolution. Tiago describes them as beings that move across cultures, religions, and times, between the human, the cosmic, and the earthly. The work does not illustrate this idea – it embodies it as sensible deformation, as the unstable thickness of the visible, between light and shadow, what came before and what is still to come. At this point, the painting opens like a cosmological Sun, a source of emission and sensible gravity that binds the gaze in the shape of a constellation.

At other moments, the space is driven by rhythm – a musical, cosmic movement built out of repetitions, pulsations, and recurrences that reorganize the time of looking. The image unfolds as frequency, generating a temporality of its own, in which the eye enters a continuous flow and space itself becomes a field of sensible expansion. In this register, the painting operates as a sequence of resonances, and the experience comes close to a kind of listening to the visible, where repetition and variation structure the pictorial field.

It is here that the painting also touches on a deeply lived dimension of artistic practice – a kind of crossing in which gesture is formed through contact with the world. As in the memory evoked by Milton Nascimento, where “many good souls took up the profession/ of playing an instrument and singing,” practice here is not separate from experience; it feeds on it. “To sing was to seek the path/ that would lead to the Sun” – and, in that same impulse, Tiago's painting organizes itself around this cosmological Sun, a source of emission, expansion, and sensible gravity that draws the gaze into a constellational field.

Made in his Berlin studio, these paintings introduce a new atmosphere – one marked by silence, expanded time, and greater density. His practice unfolds as a continuous process of transformation, in which the artist moves within his own work. In the exhibition space, the works open out as a system of relations, and the eye takes an active part in that construction. Each work holds the memory of an event still in circulation, alive in the time of whoever stands before it.

In the clearing, a breath spills out,

and the air bends into erosion;

everything ignites, everything is reprogrammed

in a moving center of transformation.

There is a rift that space calls forth,

a river of force in full dilution;

each impulse vibrates, kindles, and proclaims

the gravity of its own pulsation.

Everything seems to be born as it disappears:

a flora of air, a frenzy of pressure,

as if the scene held a name

heard only when reason gives way.

And whoever enters there, taken by that dome,

gives themselves over to pure expansion.

Ricardo Carioba

Berlin, May 15, 2026

Artist CV

Painting as a language is the main object of research for Tiago Tebet, who has been exploring its processes and forms of resignification since he was very young. Carried out with impeccable technical ability, Tiago Tebet’s investigation is moreover outstanding for its originality in exploring the possibilities and specificities of representation in painting. His research is concerned with the processes of construction and materiality, as mechanical and artisanal methods that he uses to achieve more spontaneous results, leading to a larger variation of languages.

In 2009 Tiago Tebet graduated in visual art from FAAP-SP, having participated in three Anuais (internal exhibitions of FAAP) in the years 2007, 2008 and 2009, also receiving a study grant. While still in college, he joined the Anarcademia group led by Dora Longo Bahia, through which he participated in the 28th Bienal de São Paulo, in 2008. Among his solo shows the ones held at Espaço Auroras (São Paulo, Brazil, 2023), Luciana Brito Galeria (São Paulo, Brasil, 2019, 2013 and 2011), Lisa Kandlhofer Galerie (Austria, 2018), as a result of that gallery’s summer residency program), and Instituto Tomie Ohtake (São Paulo, 2017). Group shows he has participated in include Paralela (2010), Museu de Arte de Ribeirão Preto (2011); TRIO Bienal (2015); and the 10th Bienal do Mercosul (2015). In 2016, he moreover participated in the Billingbear Residency, in England.