Notes from the studio — on how a painting is made, how it is acquired, and how it is looked after once it has left the Mata Atlântica.
Every work is sold directly from the studio, with no gallery in between. Write to Marc on Instagram at @marcsparkss — the title of a piece is enough, or simply a description of what held you. Availability, price and delivery are then discussed privately.
Yes. A commission usually begins with a conversation about scale, palette, and the light in the room the work will live in — light matters more than people expect once brass is involved. From there the studio works freely: a commission should still arrive as a painting, not as an order fulfilled.
Each painting is unique. There are no editions, no giclée reproductions and no open prints — the brass contours are laid by hand, cell by cell, so no two panels could be identical even if that were the intention.
Scale, materials and time. A tondo in brass and enamel takes weeks of hand-filling and the metal is a real cost in itself, while the larger acrylic canvases of The Trixel and The Unbecoming carry their own arithmetic. Prices are given on enquiry rather than published, as is usual for studio sales.
Buying directly from the artist removes most of what makes people hesitate: you know who made the work, when, and from what. Ask for photographs taken in daylight, ask for medium and dimensions in writing, and expect a signed certificate to travel with the painting.
Collect what you cannot stop looking at. A painting bought out of genuine attachment survives every change of taste and every change of wall — and buying early, directly, while an artist still answers their own messages, is how most considered collections begin.
The studio sits between São Paulo and the Atlantic Forest coast of Brazil. Visits happen occasionally and by arrangement — ask, and it may well be possible.
The Gilded Vines (2026) are circular paintings of the Mata Atlântica, built from brass contours filled by hand with enamel and pigment on wood panel. Six exist, at 60 and 48 cm in diameter — each one a compressed fragment of canopy rather than a view of it.
The Trixel — Fragments of Resolution (2020–2024) resolves the image into a lattice of triangular facets, a trixel being a triangular pixel. Figures and rooms surface out of the grid at the exact distance where the eye consents to assemble them, and dissolve again as you step closer.
The Unbecoming (2016–2022) is the earlier body of work — acrylic on canvas, in which figures are reduced to flat contoured planes and set among blocks of overpainted colour. Titles such as Palimpsest and Grandmama slipped and died in the bathroom say plainly what the surfaces are doing: covering, and admitting to the cover.
A tondo is a circular painting or relief, from the Italian rotondo, used since the Renaissance for subjects meant to be taken in at a single look. A circle has no horizon, so it declines the landscape's usual offer of depth and distance; what remains is closer to a lens — or to the way a memory arrives already cropped.
It is the idea the whole studio is built on: that we live through pieces of memory, instinct, desire and forgetting rather than through any continuous account of ourselves. The painting becomes the place where those pieces gather, collide or dissolve. Marc writes about it at length in Voice.
The Atlantic Forest is one of the world's great biodiversity hotspots and one of its most reduced — only a fraction of the original cover remains. Marc has lived alongside it for more than fifteen years; its density, its layering and the way it withholds light are the structure of the Gilded Vines rather than their subject.
Cloisonné is an ancient metalworking technique in which thin metal strips — cloisons, French for partitions — are fixed to a surface to form compartments, which are then filled with vitreous enamel and fired. Byzantine reliquaries, Chinese vessels and Japanese shippō all belong to that lineage.
Not in the strict sense — nothing here is kiln-fired. The studio borrows the logic rather than the furnace: brass draws the partitions, and enamel and pigment fill them by hand at room temperature. The result reads like cloisonné or leaded glass and behaves like painting, which is precisely the point.
Brass — an alloy of copper and zinc — is laid as a fine raised contour across the panel; enamel and pigment are then worked into the cells it makes; the support is a rigid wood panel rather than stretched fabric. One work, Gilded Vines IV, is brass and acrylic instead.
Panel painting predates canvas by centuries, and metal asks for it. A stretched canvas flexes, and a raised brass line on something that flexes will eventually lift; panel holds the contour still and gives the enamel a surface hard enough to pool against.
It begins in the forest and ends as a disc. The composition is drawn onto the prepared panel, the brass contour is laid line by line, each cell it encloses is filled by hand with enamel or pigment, and the surface is finally sealed. A short film of the process runs on the home page.
The acrylic paintings of The Trixel and The Unbecoming are built by covering — layer over layer, decisions buried as they are made. The enamel tondi are built by partition: nothing is buried, everything is bounded. The same preoccupation, in the opposite grammar.
Dust it with a dry, soft cloth — never damp, never a solvent, never a household spray. Keep it out of direct sunlight and away from radiators, air-conditioning outlets and bathrooms: wood moves with humidity, and stable conditions matter more than perfect ones.
Brass darkens as it ages. That patina belongs to the work and should not be polished back — metal polish would take enamel with it. If a piece ever needs attention, write to the studio before touching it.
Hang the centre at eye level, roughly 150 cm from the floor, and leave clear wall on either side — a tondo needs quiet around it. Light it from one side at an angle rather than flat-on: brass only reads as metal when the light rakes across it.
Most are shown unframed, the panel edge left as it is. If a frame is wanted, a narrow hardwood moulding — walnut, about a centimetre, sitting flush to the brass edge — suits them well; anything wider begins to compete with the circle.
Provenance is simply the documented history of a work's ownership, and for a painting bought from the studio it begins with the first document. Each work leaves signed and dated, with a certificate of authenticity giving title, year, medium and dimensions. Keep it with the painting.
Works travel rigid and crated, never rolled, insured for their full value, and are quoted per destination from Brazil. Original artworks enter most countries under a duty-free tariff heading, though local import VAT may still apply — the studio supplies the paperwork the carrier and customs will ask for.
Everything begins with a message. Write to @marcsparkss, or look again at the Series, the Artist, and the Voice.