René Tavares

"René Tavares’ practice investigates the ways identity is shaped and reshaped through history, migration, and visual culture. By overlaying archival photographs with expressive painterly gestures, he creates a visual dialogue between past and present — between imposed narratives and reclaimed authorship.

His works are acts of interruption and reinvention: faces partially obscured, erased, or re-inked, as if memory were being edited in real time. Through the repetition of strokes, textures, and symbols, Tavares challenges the authority of the colonial gaze and makes space for new readings of African presence.

For Tavares, art becomes a territory where belonging is never fixed, but continuously negotiated — a visual map of multiplicity, resistance, and transformation."

MEET

René Tavares

René Tavares (b. 1983, São Tomé and Príncipe) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores themes of memory, identity, postcolonial legacy, and cultural hybridity. After studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Rennes (France) and completing further research at the School of Visual Arts in Dakar, Tavares developed a distinctive visual language that combines painting, photography, drawing, and collage.

His work is marked by an engagement with both personal and collective histories, often revisiting colonial archives, agricultural imagery, and portraiture to explore the layered realities of African and Afro-diasporic experience. He lives and works between São Tomé and Lisbon and has exhibited widely across Africa, Europe, and Latin America.

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