Felis Dos (b. 1992, Piraju, Brazil) is a Denmark-based visual artist working primarily with painting, alongside photography, video and performance. Self-taught as an artist, Dos holds a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and has a broader intellectual background spanning theology, logistics and international strategic management.
Dos develops visual systems as philosophical propositions. He begins by making images: drawings, photographs, bodies, gestures and objects are assembled and moved until a composition begins to work. Only then does he begin to understand what the image might be asking. His paintings therefore do not illustrate ideas formed elsewhere; the image is where the thinking begins.
Across his practice, Dos investigates how identity, belonging, memory and power are formed through images and inherited narratives. His paintings bring bodies, domestic interiors, landscapes and ambiguous objects into encounters where intimacy can become unsettling and the ordinary can carry the weight of the sacred. Cultural and spiritual histories, migration and colonial inheritance meet personal photographs and fragments of popular and art-historical imagery, creating scenes in which figures can appear simultaneously familiar and estranged, present and remembered.
Dos understands himself first as an image maker and painting as the medium through which his image-making currently reaches its greatest depth. His artistic practice itself reaches beyond medium: into the way he observes, arranges, performs and inhabits the world.
Rather than using art to explain a philosophy, Dos uses it to propose one. His images are not answers to be understood correctly, but bridges into a visual world. He builds the bridge and what happens on the other side belongs to the viewer.
