17 January - 7 March 2026
All Light, No Warmth
Lucas Lugarinho
Upstream Gallery proudly presents its first solo presentation with Lucas Lugarinho (BR, 1992) in the private viewing space. Lugarinho is currently a resident at Rijksakademie and works between video game design and painting, sampling disparate media ecosystems into counter-colonial narratives that explore both mediums’ shared history as vehicles for ideology and desire.
In All Light, No Warmth, Lugarinho presents a new body of work where physical painting exercises an aesthetic and playful response to the rise of generative AI images. This series of Ghost Paintings utilizes acrylic medium on highly reflective fabrics to diffract painting’s shared elements between physical and digital mediums – light, surface, and presence – rearranging them into a game of catch. By obscuring the digitizable photographic gaze necessary to feed generative training models, the artist aspires to evoke the ghastly relevance of standing before images in times of accelerated media slop.
Lucas Lugarinho
Ghost Painting IV – Moonlight, 2026
Acrylic medium, heavy water and acrylic paint on reflexive fabric
50 x 45 cm
Acrylic medium, heavy water and acrylic paint on reflexive fabric
130 x 110 cm
Ghost Painting II – Heart Over The Fence, 2025
Acrylic medium, heavy water and acrylic paint on reflexive fabric
130 x 110 cm
Ghost Painting III – The Fall of the Angel Cop, 2026
Acrylic medium, heavy water and acrylic paint on reflexive fabric
140 x 90 cm
Acrylic medium, heavy water and acrylic paint on reflexive fabric
50 x 45 cm
