Sol de Janeiro

There is a particular kind of sun that belongs only to Rio de Janeiro — not gentle, not decorative, but total. It sits directly above you at midday and does not apologise for its presence.
Sol de Janeiro was born from a specific memory: a girl in her early teens, walking home from school, uphill, at half past noon. Sneakers on hot asphalt. The kind of heat that seeps through rubber soles. Sweat on her forehead before she reaches the corner. And a sun so close, so insistent, it felt less like something in the sky and more like something pressed against her skin.
That is why the sun in this painting is not a detail — it is almost the entire canvas. Because that is how it felt. The disc of ochre and cadmium yellow rises from the surface in thick, concentric layers of modeling paste, carved with circular marks that echo the radiating heat of a Southern Hemisphere summer. It does not float above a landscape. It simply is — sovereign, warm, unapologetic.
Brazilians complain about the Rio summer. Every carioca does. But cold hurts a carioca in a way that heat never quite does. This painting is the antidote to that — the warmth you carry in your body long after you’ve left.
Liz Souza was born in Rio de Janeiro and has since lived across four countries and twenty-five nations on five continents. Sol de Janeiro is part of a body of work that excavates personal memory and cultural identity through texture and colour. The work is signed on the verso, finished with Liquitex Professional Matte Varnish, and arrives ready to hang with D-rings and wire installed.

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“I spent years searching for hidden treasures. I didn’t know I was the treasure all along.”

Born in Rio de Janeiro — a city of impossible colour, salt air and uncontainable energy — Liz Souza spent 15 years crossing continents before she ever picked up a brush.
She lived in the rural United States, where vast landscapes taught her stillness. She drove through the Abu Dhabi desert for two years, moved by its ancient silence and vastness — a landscape so breathtaking it brought her to tears more than once. She walked the museums of Europe, absorbed New York’s relentless creative pulse, and raised three children across four countries — carrying faith as her only constant.
She came to painting not through art school, but through a lifelong visual hunger — years of museums, landscapes and a deep sensitivity to form that finally found its language on canvas.
Liz works with acrylic, sculptural texture and golden leaf — building thick, tactile surfaces that hold what words cannot. Her work carries the weight of lived experience: the heat of a Rio summer, the silence of a desert highway, the ache of years away from home, the quiet miracle of beginning again.
Every canvas is an excavation. Every texture, a layer of a life fully lived.
Based in Sydney, Australia.