His work draws on a distinguished lineage, notably the Nouveau Réalisme: the avant-garde movement that, more than any other, embraced the found object (objet trouvé) as a starting point for imagining forms, primarily in sculpture and installation, moving beyond the mere recovery and reuse of materials.
Zé Tepedino’s practice (Rio de Janeiro, 1990) belongs to a rich tradition of artistic approaches that repurpose elements of the real world, revealing everyday life at its most lyrical.
It is from the reality of Rio de Janeiro that Tepedino draws his inspiration. Beaches, rocks, urban sceneries and tourist landmarks, as well as the city’s social inequalities, inform a practice in which he stitches, ties and joins materials, bringing fragments of Rio’s distinctive identity into dialogue. Clothes hangers, parasol panels, blankets, towels, surfboards, tarpaulins, beach-chair fabric and scraps of paper, found on his journeys between home and studio or on excursions around the metropolis, are reworked to unveil a new poetic existence. An act of reclamation, a second chance at beauty after everyday use. As Zé explains: ‘My connection with these materials—beach tents, parasols, flip-flops—grew gradually. It is the pieces of canvas that really captivate me. Over time, the material develops a patina, an ageing that turns it into something close to painting. I do not see it as waste, but as something in another state of energy. It is these traces, these materialities at the margins, with their histories and potential for transformation, that truly move me.’
Zé Tepedino’s (b. 1990, Rio de Janeiro, BR) practice is deeply rooted in the material and visual fabric of Rio de Janeiro, drawing from its urban environment and coastal geography. Working across sculpture, assemblage, painting and spatial intervention, he incorporates found and repurposed materials—weathered wood, textiles, plastics, construction debris and everyday objects—retaining traces of use, exposure and previous lives. Material trajectories remain legible, foregrounding tensions and affinities between disparate surfaces, textures and forms. Tepedino’s vocabulary toys with juxtaposition: the contrast between industrial and organic, rigid and pliable, manmade and accidental, precarious and solid animate his compositions, alongside a recurring interplay of colour and volume. Across scales and media, his work recasts the vernacular and the overlooked through a sculptural language in which humour, instability and intuition intersect with residual histories and transformation.