About the artist

Roberto Cabot was born in 1963 in Rio de Janeiro and currently lives and works in Paris.

The artist is also an associated researcher at the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Critique Interdisciplinaire (LACI-LAP) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris.

He began his studies at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (FAU-UFRJ) and continued them in Paris at the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture Paris-Malaquais, where he was also admitted to the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (ENSBA) in painting with Pierre Alechinsky as professor.

During this period, Cabot developed a strong relationship with the philosopher Félix Guattari, a encounter that laid the foundation for the artist's organic network thinking and his interest in philosophical-anthropological questions.

At the end of his studies in 1987, Cabot began exhibiting and left Paris for Madrid, then Cologne, and Berlin. In 2006, he moved with his studio to his hometown of Rio de Janeiro. In 2016, he returned to Paris, where he has been residing since.

Cabot has published texts for various magazines and catalogs, and he gives lectures and courses.

Engaged in teaching, he has conducted workshops at different art schools in Europe and Brazil, such as AKI in Enschede (Netherlands), the Escuela de Bellas Artes de La Universidad de La Laguna (Spain), the HFBK (Hochschule für bildende Künste) in Hamburg, and the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage (Rio de Janeiro, where he was an entitled professor from 2012 to 2016), among others.

He is a pioneer in the use of the Internet in the arts, having participated in the historic exhibition "NetCondition" at ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medien, curated by Peter Weibel) in Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1999. Recently, he has refocused on painting as a medium.

Critical Note

In Roberto Cabot's work (2022–2025), the landscape shifts from "genre" to pictorial ecosystem. The canvas no longer frames a view: it hosts processes—growth, drifting, branching—that the artist makes visible through translucent layers, sheets of grass and sky, above which float spores, filaments, and animalcules. The vocabulary is biomorphic yet precise: clean lines, cellular punctuations, aqueous halos, as if the painting were observing a life-size scene under a microscope.

This "bio-aesthetic" shift is accompanied by an assumed morphogenesis: the figure is never closed, it fructifies. The pictorial gesture mimics the dynamics of the living (aggregation, bifurcation, controlled proliferation). The palette—vivid, "acid-pastel"—maintains a tension between chromatic seduction and organic strangeness; The visual pleasure is pierced by a gentle, non-catastrophic anxiety.

The paintings shift the landscape beyond the colonial perspective that has long constituted it as a possession—a horizon to be conquered, a resource to be extracted, a view from above. Here, the frame does not capture: it welcomes. Cabot replaces the logic of extraction (to take, isolate, name) with a politics of relationship (to coexist, connect, allow to happen). The living is not a setting but an agent; humans are no longer the center, merely one neighbor among others. This shift is consistent with non-Western epistemologies that consider forests, rivers, and mycelia as subjects of law and narrative: painting does not “represent” these worlds; it negotiates a regime of appearance with them. In this sense, Cabot works to unlearn the overarching gaze—he creates images that redistribute visual authority and open the landscape to shared sovereignties.

These paintings are post-anthropocentric: they shift the center of gravity of the gaze toward non-human agents. We do not "see" nature; we coexist with it. Hence the idea of an ecology of the gaze: looking becomes a form of care, a distributed attention that rejects the supposed neutrality of the witness and engages the responsibility of the one framing the image.

Yet there is continuity with the Aleph series (the "network image"): in the past, Cabot condensed planetary simultaneity through the juxtaposition of flows. Today, he internalizes this simultaneity in the painting, conceived as a medium traversed by heterogeneous scales. The network becomes a mycelium: no longer a plane of screens, but subterranean connections that nourish apparitions—a kind of counter-mapping where space is no longer gridded for use, but experienced for the sake of relationship.

Situated somewhere between historical biomorphism, microbial comics, and eco-critical painting, these works offer a speculative natural history. They do not document: they model—through color and form—interdependencies. In this way, Cabot decolonizes the landscape: he diverts its function of control to transform it into a relational biotope where shared politics of life are replayed in the present.