Multimedia Artist · Toronto
Régis Souto
Figurative painter. Brazilian-born, Toronto-based. Birds, flowers, faces, bodies — one line runs through them all.
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Art made where the body doesn't fit
Born in Brazil and based in Toronto, Régis Souto paints what deserves to be kept. Hummingbirds suspended against absolute black. Faces built over buried poems and song lyrics. Flowers isolated from the noise around them. Bodies negotiating between discipline and desire. Across all of it, one hand holds the work together: the black contour line, layered construction, and backgrounds that erase everything that doesn't matter — concentrating the eye on what he has decided to preserve.
The material changes with what each image asks for: gouache on black, the precise line of coloured pencil, or mixed-media canvases built over heavily textured gesso — marked with plastic bags, worn brushes, palette knives — and finished in oil, the final skin of the work. In those canvases, light is not the absence of matter: it is where the painting holds the most paint. Prismatic Identity — fusing drawing, collage, digital, video, text and performance into figurative painting — is the permanent methodology behind it all.
A student of spirituality for twenty-five years and illustrator of the 78 arcana of O Tarot dos Chacras (Alex Costa Guimarães, Brazil), Souto paints what lives in all of its layers — including the energetic one. His work moves through queerness, migration, memory and belonging. Recent exhibitions include Beyond the Contour (solo, The Show Gallery, 2026) and Archive of Unstoppable Bodies (Pride Toronto 2026, CF Toronto Eaton Centre).
"We are what we decide to preserve."
Core themes
Body
Vulnerability · Presence
Identity
Queer · Migration
Belonging
Diaspora · Heritage
Memory
Preservation · Selective light
Energy
The body's inner layer · Matter first