haul gallery
Raised-In-Brooklyn
Artist in Residence 2025

wallace dos santos

wallace dos santos (b.2000) is a brazilian-american artist and curator born and raised in brooklyn, nyc. their work spans multiple disciplines, including painting, design, sculpture, and print. they love video games, nature, memes, and astrology.

EXHIBITION:

Rhapsody in green
wallace dos santos
2025 Raised in Brooklyn Artist in Residence
March 15th - April 13, 2025

Walking through Brooklyn is a psychedelic video game. Navigating obstacles — overgrown sidewalks, dilapidated buildings, and decades-old leaky subway stations can feel like a boss battle. haul’s 2025 Raised in Brooklyn Artist in Residence, wallace dos santos, brings us into a screen-inspired reality of architectural details and design rendered in bright colors and pattern-rich paintings. Bricks and tiles are regular motifs, inspired by both Brooklyn and Lisbon, and pay homage to the Super Mario Bros. games which feature bricks as a malleable canvas and potentially the source of its entire universe. On the edges of these screens (as paintings) are frames sculpted with undulating patterns, the texture reminiscent of the many over-painted iron fences that surround the Brooklyn buildings wallace grew up in – like barriers in a side-scrolling adventure game.

Materially, wallace works to harness uncontrollable and entropic media. They primarily paint with tempera, a runny fluid medium, which strives and struggles to stay within the design. Each frame is meticulously covered in layers of paper pulp, applied as a messy wet paste. Several of the works are also painted with paper pulp directly, which causes noticeable paint-bleed, changing the animation style from 2D perspectival to a looser dream sequence. wallace’s paintings operate in two modes at once: hard-edge, pixel-based, and geometric, all the while being hand-rendered and organic.

Central to these paintings are characters in the “little guy” style – plasticine shapes with big eyes that provide a subject for the viewer to project onto. The main character, walgus, is a rounded yellow starburst with eyes only. walgus is game-world wallace, shown spending time with friends, in bed, looking in a mirror, and (alongside some basic dialogue) emoting: indifference, frustration, and profound sadness. There are other characters, like a companion modeled after wallace’s old friend, and a few background characters like the classic flower and spiky enemy. All of these little guys inhabit a world rich in architectural history and art historical references – they also bridge the gap between our digital and physical universes.

past artists in residence:
Zakariya Abdul-Qadir
Jada Hairston