An interview with: Caramurú Baumgartner
- 12 hours ago
- 5 min read
In conversation with mind-bending Brazilian artist @caramurubaumgartner
"A visual multimedia artist from Recife, Pernambuco, currently living in Rio de Janeiro. As an alchemist or a sort of magician of colors and drawings, my personal legacy as a visual artist reveals a unique, intimate, surreal and psychedelic place. The junctions of saturated colors, fluid forms, lights and lattices lead you to a new ethereal and fertile universe, where the fauna and flora sensually merge, where the artist lives." - behance.net/caramuru
Interview presented in collaboration with @psychedelicarchives
Read on below for the full interview...
First of all how are you and what are you hoping for in 2026?
I hope 2026 is a year of a lot of light and a lot of accomplishment. 2024 and 2025 were very difficult years for me, but I always stayed connected and spiritually aligned through art, even when the world around me felt hostile. This past year, I also managed to reconnect with the real world, and I think that will help me achieve many of the things I have been aiming for and visualizing over the last two years.
Could you tell us about where you are from and what you love?
I’m from Recife, but I spent a long time traveling all over Brazil. My creative routine is deeply connected to observing what’s around me and blending it with my dream world. A lot of my ideas come through sleep, through dreaming. I’m constantly creating and sketching, even though most ideas never fully come to life, because my drawings tend to be very detailed. So I have to choose one idea to follow and commit to, but all the other ideas remain noted and scribbled down, waiting for me to return to them. Some ideas I only execute five or even ten years after I first sketched them, because they stay registered somewhere, in a notebook, on paper, and I always find a way not to lose them. Of course, some things escape, especially when I’m out on the street and I tell myself I’ll write it down later. But overall, my daily life is filtered through creativity and through dreams, through the reality of dreams.
What are some of the re-occurring ideas or concepts you feel most inspired to weave into your artworks?
My current artistic signature is color, lots of color. And interestingly, I often bring the same colors into different drawings. It can look random, but I keep choosing the same seven tones, and I mix them until they feel like other colors. I’d also say my graphic signature comes from the colors and from an inky line that’s a bit dirty, almost like comic books, that pulp aesthetic. And what I love to explore is the idea of the dream, the fantastic place, the world that exists from the window inward, inside your head. It’s a harmonious universe with low gravity, a lot of levitation, and visible, tangible energies in front of your eyes and on the horizon.
Are there any particular books, artists, movies etc that you hold close to your heart who played an important part in sculpting how you look at the world?
I started by looking at a lot of 70s comics, especially Robert Crumb. Before that, my biggest reference was manga, Japanese drawing, and I learned a lot from it, especially perspective and anatomy, that slightly twisted manga anatomy. Over time, I began to admire French comics, animation in general, and surrealist artists, especially René Magritte. Also Frida Kahlo. And here in Brazil, Tarsila do Amaral. I’d say those are three pillars that really catch my attention. I used to love Salvador Dalí, but nowadays he doesn’t feel as relevant to me as a reference. Still, he was a gateway into surrealism. And of course, Moebius (Jean Giraud) is a huge inspiration in this whole process. In the end, I’m always getting inspired in small ways, all the time, by someone or by some situation I experience.
How much of an influence has surrealism played on your art and how do you perceive the connection to your work with the realm of dreams?
As I mentioned earlier, a lot of what I dream ends up becoming illustration, and a lot of what I daydream becomes illustration too. Part of my creative tools and mechanisms live in sleep, and another part comes from connecting that material to reality in an absurd way. There isn’t one single path, but it almost always passes through the figure of the woman, the human woman, the goddess of nature. Not in a sexualized way, but in a spiritualized way. I believe God is a woman, and nature is a woman. What provides and sustains the ecosystem, what carries abundance and the power of creation, is the feminine, even in the literal sense of generating another human being within itself. So I often use the female figure as a channel to carry these surreal ideas. But there are also other works I make that involve cats, or enigmatic objects, always with that immensity of the dream, an inner immensity, an infinite horizon. In the end, it all comes to the surface after a dream and a strong flood of sketches on a blank piece of paper.
How much of a role have psychedelics played in informing your creative process and/or a specific piece of art?
In the beginning, psychedelics influenced me a lot, because they allowed me to see with my own eyes certain things that felt like they only existed inside the mind. Even so, before my first experience, I already had a psychedelic, colorful direction in me, so it also became part of my artistic revolt, my own personal counterculture. Today, I use that more as reference and life baggage, and not as a direct source of creation. I still like to bring that aesthetic forward, but with awareness, as a visual language. I notice that nighttime helps me create a lot. If possible, in silence, in the middle of the night, when there are no cars, no birds, and no sunlight. Night makes me feel like I’m meeting nature, meeting the energy of the planet and the universe as a whole.
What does Spirituality mean to you?
I believe I’m a very spiritual person. I feel there is something greater both inside and outside of me. I believe in energy beyond matter, because we are standing here through some kind of miracle, if I use a religious word. For me, everything is a confluence of energy. Your energy impacts someone else’s, which impacts another person’s, and it becomes a larger spiritual field. If you learn how to align with that, in a positive way, you start to perceive that flow more clearly. I also feel like a carrier of messages that, at first, I can’t even decode myself. Along the way, as I produce, those messages reveal themselves to me. It becomes a fun process to realize I’m having a conversation with myself, from the inside out.
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Discover more of Caramurú Baumgartner's work via their:
- Astral Magazine
