Rosana Paulino’s Pantheon of Black Plant Goddesses Arrives in Paris

The growing visibility of Rosana Paulino’s work reaches a new chapter with the opening this week of her first solo exhibition in Paris, at Mendes Wood DM’s outpost in the French capital.

Titled “Bloom in the Sunlight, Dream in the Moonlight,” the exhibition introduces new plant goddesses into the Afro-botanical pantheon Paulino has been building since 2019 as part of her ongoing series “Senhora das Plantas” (Lady of the Plants), which elevates Black women to the status of goddesses in communion with nature, without implying a romanticized view. The 16 paintings—five on paper and 12 on canvas—take on renewed vitality on a larger scale and via a deeper exploration of color and increasingly ingenious bodily poses.

The central question guiding Paulino’s work has long been “What is it like to be a Black woman in Brazil?” Active since the 1990s, she had seemingly answered it, until 2018, through an indictment of the enduring consequences of slavery in Brazilian society in works like Parede da Memória (Memory Wall, 1994), which engages with the extensive gaps in the family trees of Black Brazilian families, and Assentamento (Settlement, 2013), three photographs of an enslaved Black woman printed on fabric that she fragmented and stitched back together, adding a heart and a baby. Appropriated from images taken by Auguste Stahl and taken during the 1865–66 Thayer Expedition to Brazil, Paulino’s gesture aimed to restore the woman’s humanity and history from a set of photographs made to substantiate claims of racial degeneration supposedly caused by racial mixing.

At a 2018 retrospective at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, Paulino debuted a series of drawings from the early 2000s that anticipate the psychological exploration seen later in the goddesses of Senhora das Plantas.” Marked by restless lines, these works depict a woman tentatively emerging from a cocoon in a ritual of transformation and emancipation. “Drawing is a central foundation of Rosana’s practice; it sheds light on her imagination. Forms and ideas that she develops through drawing later acquire spatiality,” Valéria Piccoli, the exhibition’s cocurator, told ARTnews. “It was important to emphasize that she was the first voice in the 1990s to speak about the issue of Black women, but also to highlight that this was part of a much broader context of her interests and desires.”

Less than a year later, she would show the earliest iteration of her botanical goddesses. A different sensibility had emerged: The figures, drawn in earth tones, were nude, but the hypersexualization of the Black female body was nowhere to be found. Instead, the works suggested a new way of conceiving wisdom and communion with nature. The series has its roots in the plants Paulino keeps in her studio. Before she named them goddesses, she initially called the plants in the series’ early works “folhas” (leaves).

“I gradually realized that it couldn’t be that simple: plants have a history, so I began to approach them more specifically,” Paulino explained in a recent interview in her studio, noting that she began the series because she could find no Black goddesses in books devoted to the sacred feminine.

She started first with snake plants (Espada de Iansã in Portuguese). “Then I turned my attention to the jatobá tree,” she added. Works from the series soon appeared in the world’s two oldest recurring exhibitions: the 2022 and 2026 Venice Biennales and the 2023 Bienal de São Paulo. For São Paulo, Paulino moved from watercolor on paper to painting on canvas, scaling her drawings up to nearly 9 feet by 20 feet. Next, she introduced the mangrove. The goddesses in these paintings have a serene air, with roots firmly anchored in the earth, but also a crown of leaves that sway with the wind.

This year, her investigation into Comigo Ninguém Pode (scientifically known as Dieffenbachia), a toxic plant also associated with spiritual protection, lend the Brazilian Pavilion its title. The pavilion’s curator Diane Lima first saw the works at Mendes Wood DM’s New York space, which had “the day and night series, in which Rosana paints and draws against a black background. I had never seen these works in person before. They convey a sense of mystery and magic; there is a certain aurality to them that truly moves us,” she said of her decision to include work form this series in Venice. “And it had that same impact in Italy. It is the exhibition’s great amulet, and it’s no coincidence that it is positioned right at the entrance.”

Approaching them as if she is still drawing at a table, Paulino lays flat her canvases, which she prepares with gesso mixture to seals the weave so they behave more like paper when she adds watercolor and acrylic on their surfaces. Her decision to work horizontally, however, also reflects a conceptual choice. “I’m not going to reproduce the watercolor brushstrokes on canvas. But at the same time, this idea of vertical painting is very Western. […] My thing is to work on a table,” she said.

Her plant goddesses have recently become more ambiguous as she has become interested in species that thrive in shade or offer it, like Comigo Ninguém Pode. And Paulino’s research into plantas de poder (plants of power), used for spiritual protection in Afro-Brazilian religious traditions, has only deepened, the relationship between her plants and the cycles of day and night becoming more expansive.

In Paris, she will show what she is calling “nocturnal” canvases featuring new goddesses—or new versions of existing ones—associated with angel’s trumpet (Brugmansia). A genus known for its exuberant flowers in a range of colors—white, salmon, purple, lilac, pink—they possess a particular luminosity that makes the petals seem, in a sense, translucent. Their alluring quality belies their extreme toxicity; at times used as a hallucinogen, their ingestion can cause severe mental confusion and even death.

Paulino is drawn to this duality: “It’s a plant with a certain weight to it—a size, a scent. But it’s one of the most dangerous plants there is. Many people have lost their lives after ingesting teas containing it.” In Angel’s trumpet (2026), a figure sits on the ground, roots dangling from her knees. Branches emerge from her eyes, bearing the plant’s trumpet-shaped flowers. In her seduction, this goddess exudes strength. An untitled 2026 work, featuring a bromeliad goddess, inhabits a different atmosphere. The seated figure twists her torso in a yoga-like pose, while leaves emerge from her mouth as if she had been chattering animatedly. Her expression is gentle, and her hair cropped short, with a texture resembling tightly coiled hair. Paulino achieved this effect using a tool she made herself: a branch with a sponge attached to its tip.

“You don’t need long, flowing hair to be a goddess,” she said. “My series ‘Senhoras das Plantas’ exists because woman is an archetype that the West cannot fully comprehend,” the artist concludes.