His career began in the early 1980s when, alongside his school buddies Paulo Monteiro, Carlito Carvalhosa, Fábio Miguez and, later on, Nuno Ramos, he founded the collective studio that would come to be known as Casa 7 (House 7). Fueled by the painting rediscovery movement and imbued with a strong experimental impetus, the artists created a space of intense intellectual and affective exchange. Inspired by punk culture, neo-expressionism, and the likes of Philip Guston, Markus Lüpertz, and Georg Baselitz, Andrade first started working with synthetic enamel on kraft paper, a technique that enabled large sizes at low costs. In his practice, the pictorial surface gains thickness and becomes marked by a sense of urgency and the spontaneity of improvisation.

The group soon garnered institutional recognition, and in 1985, invited by Aracy Amaral, it held the Casa 7 exhibit at MAC USP — of which she was the director —, which would later travel to MAM Rio, then under the direction of Frederico Morais. In that same year, they joined the 18^th São Paulo Biennial – O Homem e a Vida (Man and Life), in the emblematic exhibit curated by Sheila Leirner that became known as “A Grande Tela” (The Great Painting). Andrade’s artworks were marked by energetic vigor, strong gestures, and material density — traits that would remain central throughout his oeuvre.

In the final moments of Casa 7, and still within a group dynamic, Rodrigo Andrade’s work takes a turn toward abstraction, moving away from narrative and figuration to approach arte povera and artists who explored new materialities and languages — such as Joseph Beuys, Richard Serra, Robert Rauschenberg, Jannis Kounellis, Hélio Oiticica, and Mira Schendel. In 1987, he held his first solo exhibition, presenting medium- and large-format works made with oil and synthetic enamel on various materials such as wood, lead, cardboard, fabric, and rubber. These works convey the industrial density and rough texture of their constitution, while reinforcing the expressive and dramatic nature characteristic of Andrade’s practice.

In the 1990s, Rodrigo Andrade begins to reconnect with figuration. His paintings incorporate narrative elements and direct references to art history. At one point, he turns to the somber, introspective world of Oswaldo Goeldi, whose figures and atmospheres the artist recreates with pictorial potency and the thickness of oil paint. This phase reveals a renewed attention to the presence of worldly things — transposed from the graphic field of engraving to the density and heft of oil painting.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Andrade returns to abstraction, this time with a more systematic approach. He abandons the figure to dedicate himself to chromatic volumes that emerge out of a neutral background like autonomous signs. This visual economy gives rise to a language of its own where color and matter become near-sculptural presences. The artist describes this movement as the “discovery of a new way of painting.”

Restrained and dense, these appearances project onto the homogenous surface like enigmatic signs and, at the same time, like chromatic bodies. In a way, it is as if the color blocks contained the genetic information for his entire oeuvre, as if they were the minimal elements of his pictorial practice or the genesis out of which spaces, objects, scenes, and landscapes can be born.

This nature of the color blocks and their vocation as tools for rethinking spaces and art history itself has bred various spatial interventions, in different contexts, from institutions such as MAM São Paulo and the São Paulo Pinacoteca to a street snack bar.

For the 29^th São Paulo Biennial — Há sempre um copo de mar para um homem navegar (There is always a glass of sea for a man to sail on), curated by Moacir dos Anjos and Agnaldo Farias, Andrade brings the Matéria noturna (Nocturnal matter) series, which condensed the rigor of formal research with new expressive power. In these large-sized paintings of thick materiality, the artist works with night photographs to create paintings in which blackness projects onto the surface like a living substance, allowing a glimpse of an interior, bits of landscape, and two abstract compositions. This dense layer of paint not only describes the atmosphere but seems to advance towards the spectator, creating tension between light and opacity, figure and shade, matter and illusion.

In Matéria noturna, each painting oscillates between recognition and the dissolution of form, between the visible and the disform. The gesture is restrained, almost impersonal, yet the physical presence of the paint — a stylistic feature of Andrade’s — introduces a latent energy capable of transforming the scene into a sensorial and psychological experience. The volumetric drive and graphic power, as well as the interspersing of phantasmagoric figuration and the abstract blotch, synthesize — and reconcile — the different vectors in his work. The result is a reflection on the very act of painting, the boundaries of representation, and our own sensorial perception. The presentation cemented Andrade’s status as one of the leading names in Brazilian contemporary painting.

Over the course of forty years, Rodrigo Andrade developed a body of work marked by transmutation and by an experimental, metaphysical, and metalinguistic approach. Painting becomes a field of permanent tension where thick layers of paint grow denser or dissolve, like unstoppable forces that flow into landscapes, spaces, objects, and graphisms in constant motion.

Personal photographs, news images, references to art history, and paintings by other artists get absorbed and reformulated into compositions loaded with dense material layers and imbued with a psychological and emotional dimension.

Mutation is both the subject and the method: his paintings result from a process where each gesture converts into another, where the blotch becomes a block, the block becomes an object, and the object turns into space, underlining the world as matter in transit. Likewise, his practice incorporates the impetus of transformation, always opening itself up to novel paths and existential possibilities.

Series such as Duas cavernas (Two caves), which seems to make a transition between the “color blocks” and figuration, and Criaturas ornamentais (Ornamental creatures), where the restrained geometry takes on articulation and organic expression, reveal the persistence of a vital drive: the desire to always discover a new way of painting. His work affirms painting as a living organism — a space where the world and one’s way of seeing it are continuously reinvented.

In 2017, the São Paulo Pinacoteca hosts the career retrospective show Rodrigo Andrade: Pintura e Matéria (1983-2014) (Rodrigo Andrade: Painting and Matter [1983-2014]), curated by Taisa Palhares. The exhibition featured over a hundred artworks created over the course of three decades, revealing both the breadth and the consistency of a research work entirely devoted to painting and its developments.

In 2022, the artist held a new retrospective show with the same title at the Oscar Niemeyer Museum, in Curitiba, and at the Iberê Camargo Foundation, in Porto Alegre. The show covered a wider timespan, reaffirming the elasticity of a constantly mutating oeuvre that nevertheless retains the enthusiasm of his stylistic lines.

Intense and charged, his compositions reflect the drive and the mutable character of life, and his body of work is testimony to the vitality and elasticity of contemporary painting, incorporating multiple references, techniques, genres, and themes. Between conceptual rigor and intuitive manifestation, between physicality and iconography, between erudition and the prosaic, his oeuvre always looks to put forth a fresh take on the history of painting and its ability to consider, represent, and transform the dynamics of life. By the same token, it provokes our sensory and perceptual faculties, tensing the way in which we view, absorb, and reprogram the world around us.