Lines Hold What Words Cannot
"I did not arrive at art. I continued into it."
De Morais is the artistic pseudonym of Marcelo Aparecido de Morais Leite, a Brazilian artist and curator based in Munich. Trained as a civil engineer (CREA/PR, 2008), he spent two decades building what others imagined — calculating loads, reading blueprints, verifying dimensions on real construction sites across two countries.
He works in geometric abstraction, drawing on Mondrian and the Neoplasticists for structure, on Malevich and the Suprematists for the autonomy of pure form, and on the Bauhaus for the conviction that construction and art were never separate disciplines. What he brings that none of them had is the lived experience of structural drawing. The blueprint line in his work is not a reference. It is muscle memory.
His interest is the threshold — the moment between intention and what actually emerges. A color appears at an intersection that was not chosen. These are not mistakes. They are the work.
He is the founder and curator of W/ Soul Art Gallery, Munich, and manages the estate of J.K.S. Hohburg (1932–2002).
Geometric abstraction has a long inheritance and a common problem: the line arrives as quotation. A century after De Stijl, the vocabulary is available to anyone, and most of what is made with it refers to the tradition rather than extending it.
De Morais enters from the opposite direction. He did not study the blueprint line as art history; he drew it for twenty years, on sites where a wrong dimension has consequences that no gallery visit can produce. The precision is not stylistic. It is professional, and it precedes the decision to make images at all. What separates this work from homage is that the language was already his before he asked it to describe something else.
W/ Soul does not present its founder's work as an exception to its own standard. The position is the same one applied to every artist in the roster: the work is here because the language is earned rather than borrowed.