Menu
The New Contemporary Art Magazine
The tropical worlds of Pedro Varela (b. 1981 in Niterói, Brazil) look like they belong in a psychedelic dream or the pages of a storybook. And while the artist's style builds on fairytale imagery and fantasy, his works also engage with history -- namely, the 17th to 19th century "artist-scientists" who rendered an exotic vision of Tropical Paradise and the "New World" in their travels to Brazil. Blending Baroque still life, colonial iconography, and modern styles such as Neo-concretism, Varela engages with the past to create his own version of "paradise" that is at once alluring and cautionary.