A child of a bustling city of contrast and colors, Rodrigo Branco‘s affinity for abstraction may come as no surprise. But his blurred portraits of local people in São Paulo, created using patches of colors and expressive strokes, are actual representations of what the artist used to see as a little kid. Raised in the southern outskirts of the city, Branco had a severe vision impairment that was left untreated for years.
This significantly distorted his view of reality, and it wasn’t until later in life that he realized he’d been seeing the world through an unique visual filter. Seeing objects in different shapes, colors in different shades, it was the way Branco saw people’s faces that left the strongest impact on him. During his frequent visits to a local circus, for instance, he would see clowns as stack of huge colored objects with a big red circle in the middle. When years later he started stepping away from traditional letter-based graffiti, photographs taken by his father and vivid memories from his childhood influenced him to start painting these characters.
Last year, he was commissioned by the MyFinBec to create a series of original images for their annual art project. Over a course of couple of months, layering different mediums and reinventing the images, the Brazilian artist created a series of 42 paintings on canvas titled “Distintos Filhos” (“Distinct Family”). Aiming to make an artistic interpretation of the characters involved in his everyday life, he painted his friends, family members, neighbors and random people from the street. Using their photos from identity cards as a basis for the portraits, and mixing colors of the urban surroundings with strong features of people, Branco’s new body of work is haunting and emotive, even nostalgic, at the same time.
Canadian-born artist 
Often using himself as a subject, Madrid-based painter 
For more than thirty years, Kerry James Marshall has been creating art to inspire important conversations about African American history and identity. His paintings follow the grand traditions of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, but with new narratives in which black people are the central figures. While Marshall initially began his career as an abstract artist, his dramatic shift to figurative painting occurred in the 1980s when he realized that African American artists and subjects were being excluded from major art museums and galleries. Marshall decided he would use the techniques of the Old Masters so revered in those institutions to create a new dialogue, in which black perspectives are given greater visibility within the art history canon.
Minneapolis based artist Michael Carson captures the fleeting moments of stylish modern day people. While there is a sense of immediacy in painting them, there is also a timelessness in their 40s and 90s-esque glamour. His subject's fashion is one of the ways that Carson injects himself into his works; patterns in clothing and the interiors of rooms are particularly prevalent, reflecting his interests in design and fashion.