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For ExpoChicago 2026, we presents a solo booth by Diego Mouro, featuring a new body of paintings centered on the figure of Our Lady of the Rosary and the Afro-Brazilian traditions of the Congado.

For years, Diego Mouro has opened, through painting, a territory where faith, memory, and history intersect. In this space, the visible does not separate from the dreamlike. His practice emerges from continuous study — iconographic, spiritual, historical — finding in the studio a site of slow revelation. One painting leads to another; an image already inscribed on the canvas summons the next. The work advances like someone feeling their way toward a presence that never fully reveals itself.

In Brazil, devotion to Our Lady of the Rosary intertwines with Afro-Brazilian traditions and with ways of being forged through resistance. In the narratives of the Congado, the saint rises from the waters covered in flowers when called by collective song, by the sound of drums, by dancing bodies. As she emerges, she becomes a woman and dances among them — and what was once supplication transforms into celebration.

From this tradition emerge the Brotherhoods of Our Lady of the Rosary of Black Men, guardians of a religiosity shaped by celebration,
care, and transmission. It is within this current that Mouro situates his
painting, allowing popular faith to pass through pictorial matter and turn the canvas into a field of presence.

The works unfold like chapters within a single narrative. Each canvas expands upon the previous one and anticipates the next. Within them are water, sound, movement, breath. The eye almost hears the rhythm of the instruments, follows the course of the waters, senses
the vibration of bodies. The painting carries echoes of art history while offering itself as a sensorial experience, where matter and spirituality meet. In the artist’s own words, “it is urgent to live enchanted.” The exhibition embraces this urgency as both a poetic and political gesture: to sustain enchantment as a form of endurance,
resistance, and care.

Blue runs throughout the exhibition. Blue of mantle, of sea, of protection. A blue that holds a childhood memory of the artist, when a blessing wished for Our Lady to cover his paths. The color envelops, sustains, keeps watch. At Expo Chicago, Mouro presents an experience of mystery shaped by Brazilian history and its layers of faith, violence, and reinvention. Our Lady of the Rosary reveals herself and protects.

And in painting, she continues to call.

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Works

Sá Rainha é vista no mar, 2026

Oil on canvas
27 x 35 cm
10 5/8 x 13 3/4 in

Flores pra rainha
(Flower to rainha), 2026

óleo s/ tela
Oil on canvas
53 x 40 cm
20 7/8 x 15 3/4 in

A rainha, a santa
(The rainha, the saint), 2026

Oil on canvas
70 x 50 cm
27 1/2 x 19 3/4 in

O tambor que chama a rainha (The drum that calls the rainha), 2026

Oil on canvas
40 x 60 cm
15 3/4 x 23 5/8 in