Superfície is pleased to present Caderno de criação: criatura às avessas [Creation Notebook: Creature Inside Out], Thiago Molon‘s first solo exhibition in São Paulo. Consolidating his recent representation by the gallery, the show brings together about 20 paintings that originate from his sketchbooks. Creating a universe of his own in which popular imagination, memory, and fiction merge.

Born in Rio de Janeiro, it was among the streets of the Vidigal community that Thiago Molon honed his keen eye on the world. At age 13, he was already painting walls and facades in the favela, making it his first laboratory for experimentation. He graduated in Graphic Design from PUC-Rio, but shortly thereafter he was already devoting himself entirely to painting. Today, the artist works in a studio surrounded by Atlantic Forest, among philodendrons and ferns.

For the past ten years, Thiago Molon has kept sketchbooks as his main creative tool. Interested in the cultural manifestations that permeate different places and realities, it is in the core that poetry is found. He develops an aesthetic vocabulary in which he scribbles creatures and landscapes that merge personal memories with a collective symbolic repertoire. He collects fragments from the city—images, colors, textures—and, in his studio, converts them into paintings, sculptures, and installations.

In the text accompanying the exhibition, journalist and curator Leonel Kaz says:

They are bodies, made of rags and transparencies, immersed in forms of a certain cubism, contemporary and curvilinear. Often, the bodies appear within frames that resemble the roofs of a house. It is there that the space is inhabited by beings with exposed viscera and bones, in opaque yet translucent colors, with a sense of firmness and beauty that jumps out at us (are we ourselves mirrored there?).

In dialogue with references ranging from Wifredo Lam and Diego Rivera to the photographs of Martín Chambi — and, by extension, to the Latin American literary tradition of magical realism — the artist creates his own folklore. The backyard and the anthill, for example, appear as indices of a common imaginary that, in isolation, awakens deeply personal feelings. It is no coincidence that the titles of his works are concise, repetitive, and suggestive rather than descriptive.

Scheduled to open on Tuesday, November 25, Caderno de criação: criatura às avessas [Creation Notebook: Creature Inside Out] inaugurates Thiago Molon’s representation by Superfície and will remain on display at the Oscar Freire headquarters until January 2026