Felis Dos (b. 1992, Piraju, Brazil) is a Denmark-based visual artist working primarily with painting, alongside photography, video and performance. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and has a background in logistics and international strategic management.
Dos develops visual systems as philosophical propositions. His practice is rooted in an ongoing investigation of how we see, understand and inhabit the world—and how that understanding is inseparable from the way we understand ourselves. Rather than beginning with predetermined answers, Dos develops images through the act of making. Drawings, photographs, gestures, bodies and objects are assembled until a composition begins to operate; the questions within the work often reveal themselves through this process.
His visual archive includes photographs of himself, friends and family, collected drawings and imagery from cinema, art history, popular culture and Brazilian cultural and spiritual histories. He transforms these materials through painting, photography and other forms of image-making, working with composition, colour, framing, staging, layering, concealment and revision. Influenced particularly by the construction of images in photography and cinema, he treats images as material that can be displaced, dismantled and rebuilt.
Dos' path towards art developed after living in Córdoba in 2016. Originally drawn to cinema, he gradually understood himself as an image maker and began working across different media before establishing painting as his primary field of practice. His relationship with art, however, extends beyond a particular medium: he considers artistic practice a way of being in the world, with everyday life, relationships, work, performance and observation all becoming potential sites for artistic thinking.
His intellectual formation is similarly interdisciplinary. Alongside philosophy, Dos encountered theology during his youth and later studied logistics and international strategic management. These apparently different fields continue to inform his interest in systems, structures, belief and the ways people construct meaning.
His work moves between documentary and fabulation, recognition and uncertainty, the intimate and the universal. Rather than using art to explain a philosophy, Dos uses it to propose one. The works offer a visual world rather than a fixed conclusion: the artist builds the bridge, while what happens on the other side belongs to the viewer.