Allan Gandhi (b. 1989, Guarujá, Brazil; lives and works in São Paulo) develops a dramatic and highly tactile painterly language that operates on the fluid boundaries between eccentricity, humor, and psychological unease. Treating his studio practice as a pictorial diary of lived and felt experiences, Gandhi paints intuitively directly onto canvas, cardboard, or linen without preliminary sketches.
His work is defined by an ongoing search for characters that simultaneously attract and unsettle—figures with elongated limbs, dissolving features, and intense facial expressions that confront the viewer with a quiet, surreal strangeness. Through a vibrant, heavily worked palette, Gandhi leans into the physical weight and behavior of his materials, contrasting the deep satin luster of oil paint against the matte density of oil sticks to build rich, blurred landscapes where narrative meaning remains intentionally ambivalent.