Flowers for eyes, a horizon for a mouth… a popsicle for a holy relic? Brazilian artist Rafael Silveira’s surreal paintings replace facial features with landforms, flora, and fauna, sometimes hybridizing animals, figures, and other objects. His works, recently on display at KP Projects Gallery in Los Angeles, explore visual synonymies—formal correspondences between seemingly unrelated things.

Vertical pieces with ornate, hand-carved wooden frames resemble the silhouette of popsicles, while figures hold giant versions of the frozen treats, nodding to Renaissance religious art. The popsicle, a quirky reference, symbolizes the artist’s belief that everything in the universe is connected. No matter how absurd—such as a man with a tree for a head or ice cream cones floating in a starry sky—the point is that these items coexist individually. Silveira juxtaposes objects and organisms in unlikely scenarios, challenging our perception of the world.

One compositional form, the tavola centinata, with a squared base and rounded top, shares the same silhouette as a classic popsicle. In a statement, Silveira says: ‘The connection is at once surprising and inevitable. One belongs to the sacred history of painting; the other to the realm of the ephemeral, the popular, the sweet, the melting. Bringing them together creates a bridge between devotional form and unstable matter, between permanence and disappearance, between the spiritual weight of the altarpiece and the fragile delight of something destined to dissolve.’

Explore more of Silveira’s work on Instagram.