Caio Reisewitz

Caio Reisewitz is one of Brazil’s most acclaimed contemporary photographers. From 1992 to 1997, he studied at the Johannes Gutenberg Art Academy at the University of Mainz in Germany. In 2009, he received a masters’ degree in Visual Poetics from the School of Communication and Visual Arts at the University of São Paulo. Reisewitz is noted for his imposing, large-format color images of his country’s urban architecture and tropical rainforests, and for his inventive photocollages. He started with these relatively small handmade photocollages in 2009. In terms of his working process, Reisewitz first assembles the collages by hand in traditional fashion. He then photographs the completed collage and prints it at a sligtly larger size so that the tiny details are more clearly legible.


These works extend his examination of the interplay between the forest and the city. Sometimes they contain lyrically curving cut-out shapes that echo the energetic visual rhythms found in Brazilian modernist art and architecture of the 1960s. The photocollages also employ startling contrasts of scale, with tiny images of ramshackle favela buildings, for instance, materializing in the branches of trees. His large-scale works have also begun to incorporate small collage elements that are at first easy to miss. Digitally inserted into otherwise realistic scenes, they seem calculated to test the viewer’s attentiveness to the content of the image.


His work has been exhibited widely in Europe and Latin America. He represented Brazil at the 2005 Venice Biennale with the solo exhibition Threatened Utopias. Reisewitz lives and works in São Paulo.