Fernando Velloso started his career in the 70s and consolidated it in the two following decades. He is one of those artists who had the chance to experiment with practically everything the 80s and the 90s could offer: access to an acute understanding of the history of Brazilian and international art from the point of view of modernism and also to the critical perspectives that later questioned this modernist perspective. Furthermore, his generation established a new paradigm of Brazilian art: a refusal to perpetuate an exotic image of Brazil (and of its art) and a desire to articulate art so as to translate a complex view of the country, its society, and its culture. At least partially due to this, Velloso's art, like his contemporaries', promotes a reconfiguration of the great themes of Brazilian culture while engaging in an incisive dialogue with the transnational art world - after all, these artists work at times when certain motifs have become global.

They propose a new reading of Brazilian culture, in which great attention is paid to multicultural roots and there is a desire to forge a language that is, at once, original and a synthesis of the country's life. This is a point of a network of questions that signify, explicitly or implicitly, the confrontation with a long and complex articulation of various conflicted elements of a history that has been celebrated or subdued according to the circumstances. Velloso's paintings are imagined spaces. In these spaces a charged and lively aesthetic debate is, at times, asserted or celebrated; tensions and ironies are exposed; and conventions are even defied.