Caru Costa Brandi

Porto Alegre – RS, 1995

By dedicating himself to tattooing, illustration, and drawing, Caru Costa Brandi began understanding himself as a non-binary trans person at the end of 2017. The contact he had since then with other trans people was what prompted him to study and draw expressions of dissident and resistant masculinities and femininities.

“It was from the angst and urgency to represent deviating corporealities that Transviados was born, in 2019, and has since then become my main artistic practice. The paintings and drawings are inspired by my reality and experience as a transmasculine person as well as by the want and urgency for representation of trans men, transmasculine, and non-binary persons, in their various existences and performativities”, says the artist.

In this series, the bodies of transmasculine people, trans men, and AFAB non-binary people illustrate – with acrylic paint and watercolors – the intersectional binarism of gender and of the masculine, by attributing representations of femininities and masculinities to a single body.

“The idea of an ideal body is discarded when a diversity of bodies and existences is represented. The real and the fictional are joined, as they are in trans-vesti-gender bodies, shattering what is expected of a transmasculine body. A body that weeps, that claims another masculinity that not the hegemonic, that wasn’t born in the wrong body, that can also perform femininity within its masculinity, or even deny them”, Caru analyzes.

Artworks:

“Momento T” [“T Moment”] (2021). Part of the series Transviades: acrylic paint on paper. Dimensions: 29,7cm x 42cm.

“Boyceta y sua cobra” (2021). Part of the series Transviades: acrylic paint on paper. Dimensions: 29,7cm x 42cm.

“Transviadecer” (2020). Part of the series Transviades: watercolor and ink. Dimensions: 21cm x 29,7cm.