“Additional information”

Developing installations, drawings and assemblages, Rufino uses found objects or his personal collection to construct his poetics based on an investigation centered on emotional or family memory. He has exhibited at The Andy Warhol Museum, in the USA; at the 6th Havana Biennial, in Cuba; at the 1st End of the World Contemporary Art Biennial, in Ushuaia; at the 2nd Mercosul Visual Arts Biennial, and at the 25th São Paulo International Biennial, both in Brazil. Rufino's work is part of the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC) in Niterói and Curitiba, the Oscar Niemeyer Museum and the Aloísio Magalhães Museum of Modern Art (MAMAM) in Recife.

In the early 1980s, Rufino worked with postal art, but later, correspondence became the starting point for another exploration. In the series "Cartas de areia", begun in the 1990s, the artist wrote, drew and painted on letters from his family. In his first solo exhibition, in 1995, Rufino presented "Respiratio", an installation composed of drawers filled with cement. At this time, Rufino turned to the memory no longer strictly personal, of family letters, but to the common memory, of the wear and tear caused by time, and its possible consequences.

In works such as "Murmuratio" (2001), "Summa" (2004) or "Nostrum spiritus rebellis, Nostrum spiritus domitus" – which is part of the Itaú Cultural collection – Rufino uses elements of antique or colonial furniture, distorting their use and creating an atmosphere that refers to another time. For critic and curator Rodrigo Moura, “Almost all of the work of the artist from Paraíba is based on the appropriation of archives, documents and narratives linked to his personal history, but also connected to broader and more public contexts. Ultimately, it is about bringing together everyday history and autobiography, and these to collective memory.”