There are places that can only be seen from within.
They don’t appear on postcards and won’t reveal themselves to hurried eyes.
They are made of pauses, of stillness, of time spent by the river or beneath the shadow of any tree.
They are spaces where beauty reveals itself in silence: in the hull of a solitary canoe, in the curve of a bucket balanced on the head, in the slow dance of a leaf on the current.
In the series RAIZ, artist Lucas Antony, born in Manaus, invites us to cross the waterline that separates an outsider’s gaze from the intimacy of belonging. Far from tropical clichés and Amazonian postcard imagery, the artist seeks what pulses beneath the surface: forgotten details, everyday gestures, silences between trees.
Here, the Amazon is not exuberance. It is memory.
Not spectacle. But sustenance.
In the images that make up this series, each scene feels infused with a time that isn’t measured in dates, but in lived experience. These are fragments of an inhabited forest, of a city lived from the inside, captured with the tenderness of someone who knows both the weight and the lightness of having been born there.
RAIZ is a gesture of return.
But not to childhood, nor the past.
It’s a return to what endures — even far away, even in absence.
An emotional geography that, once placed on a wall, finds permanence.
Lucas Antony transforms longing into aesthetic matter.
And reminds us that, for those who carry their root within, any house can become a forest.
