Luciana Rique (b. 1978, Rio de Janeiro) is a contemporary artist working between London and Rio de Janeiro. Her artistic practice is rooted in photography, which she employs as a means to access and articulate the unseen and the intangible. Her images evoke an alternate reality: a parallel, suspended universe where silence, stillness, and inner resonance prevail. Drawing upon a minimalist vocabulary, her compositions are imbued with conceptual rigour and subtly echo the visual poetics of modernist photography, reimagined through a deeply personal and meditative lens.
Luciana holds a degree from New York University and went on to study photography at Spéos in Paris, where she worked as an assistant to the photographer Jean-Pierre Dutilleux. More recently, she has been actively engaged in art and photography groups both in Brazil and the United Kingdom, and currently undertakes ongoing artistic mentoring with the esteemed curator Eder Chiodetto.
Her first solo exhibition, Intermission, curated by Chiodetto, was held in September 2023 in Rio de Janeiro and formed part of the official ArtRio circuit. In early 2024, Luciana was selected for the Luis Maluf Artistic Residency, presenting her work in the residency's group exhibition at Usina Luis Maluf and in Acervo, a collective show at Galeria Luis Maluf during the SP-Arte fair.
In September 2024, she had her second solo exhibition, Vulnerable Solid, in Rio de Janeiro.
In March 2025, Luciana presented a revised and expanded edition of her Vulnerable Solid exhibition at FONTE Gallery in São Paulo, again under the curatorship of Eder Chiodetto.
Luciana Rique’s studio, located in the Leblon neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro, has a selection of her works available for acquisition. Visits may be arranged by appointment.
My practice embraces photography not merely as a tool, but as a language — a visual conduit to access the unconscious. My work is sensorial, spiritual, introspective, and untethered to time. The camera, for me, functions as a brush: a means of translating emotions that lie beyond the scope of spoken language.
My images do not seek to describe the world we know, but rather to transcend it — unveiling inner landscapes and hidden emotional topographies. They act as mirrors to the psyche, offering powerful representations of states of being that are often repressed, concealed, or left unarticulated. They summon the viewer into a quiet quest: an intimate search for the unknown, for that which dwells in the margins of perception.
I construct a parallel universe — one that is unheard, unseen, unspoken. It is a realm unbound by gravity, where rules and structures disintegrate. Within it, fictional personae emerge, imbued with voice, presence, and vitality. They float, they vibrate, they commune — in a space where silence becomes expressive and levitation is metaphor. In this suspended atmosphere, my work offers a therapeutic cadence for those willing to pause, to contemplate, to feel.
The use of blur — a recurring device in my imagery — introduces a veil of mystery and delicacy. Forms seem to hover on the verge of disappearance, inviting the viewer to step in, to move beyond surface and certainty. These are not images that present answers, but rather invitations: to slow down, to breathe differently, to enter a meditative state in which linear time dissolves. Through this temporal shift, we are urged to read between the lines, to inhabit the threshold — the in-between — rather than any fixed destination. My photographs suggest illusions, mirages, fleeting apparitions: fragments caught in the act of becoming, never quite arriving, yet always in motion.
It is through emotion that I gently find my way into new worlds. My practice resides within the terrain of synaesthesia, evoking sensations that elude rational comprehension. By navigating this subconscious realm, I uncover paths to awakening — reflections that compel not only artistic engagement, but personal transformation.
Luciana Rique in between the photographic gaps
Arising in the context of positivism in the first half of the 19th century, photography appeared as a tool that had the capacity to record and legitimise the occurrence of events in space-time. Its ability to mimic realities and generate images that allow humanity to revisit history, has completely revolutionised our relationship with the past ever since.
Before the 19th century had even come to an end, photographers and artists were already making use of photography and imbuing it with other possibilities, seeing in it the opportunity to fabulate and to make intangible realities and fantasies visible. In the 20th century Dadaists and Surrealists broke down many of the limits that enclosed freedom of expression in photography. Collages, montages, darkroom tricks, solarisation and other experiments led photography to become a place for freer and more unstable existences, subject to the designs of whoever was holding the camera, without losing touch with its social role as an eyewitness of historical time. Documenting and inventing became two of the paths along which photography could proceed. Today we have arrived at the consensus that these two paths are not impervious and the porosity between them shows that documentation can be invention and vice versa.
In the context of contemporary photography, some artists working in the field of metalanguage have made use of this pseudo-dichotomy to bring to light the pulse of fragments from our surroundings that are often invisible to the naked eye, yet their camera-eyes are able to develop strategies that offer freedom wherever this enclosure predominates.
Luciana Rique’s poetic investigation is positioned precisely at this threshold between the unseen and the discovered, between the occult and the apparition. An avid participant in the contemporary art circuit, her gaze as a photographer has been forged in the works of artists who are references for her, such as Donald Judd, Mark Rothko, Richard Serra, Man Ray and Pierre Soulages.
Her love of these artists has led Luciana Rique to touch on conceptual questions through her photography that we often also see in their work: strategies for destabilising the notion of the two and three-dimensionality of volumes and for fracturing the relationship between figure and background. The capacity to penetrate potent atmospheres by playing with colour and of focusing on a determined form only to make it dissolve within a deeper contemplation, are among the experiments that comprise this artist’s lexicon, as she strives to reconfigure spatial dimensions by offering a type of parallel territory for existential reflection.
Based on these presuppositions Luciana Rique has created, over the last two years, a photographic series that has turned her creative gesture into an intense personal journey within the contours of therapeutic self-analysis. As such, a constellation of images which together can form a parallel world that brings comfort has been formed. These are photographs that seek the most stable and harmonious balance possible between form, light, colour, pattern and texture. At times it seems as though we are in the presence of a photographical haiku, in which the artist aims to achieve an impactful sensorial instance through the bare minimum of resources.
In Luciana’s own words: “In photography I discovered the possibility of creating a parallel world. The photography I practise escapes from a specular and mimetic relationship with the surroundings. I don’t document the visible, but rather parcels of light, the play of colour and volume that are hidden in the landscape. So photography works as a type of detector for new visual potency, new landscapes. They are diaphanous, volatile places, which at the same time take me into a contemplative state in which I feel embraced. I think they are images that offer me the initial stages of meditation”.
In order for photographic images to inspire the path of internalisation and of meditation in engaging with light, tonalities, lines and volumes, an artist must learn how to model this language wisely. Here, in this case, direct photography provides us, through the poetics of Luciana Rique, a renewed, harmonious vision of an unexpected and calm beauty, by carefully spying on everyday spaces that our restless gaze so often tends to overlook.
- Eder Chiodetto, Curator