FAce-lIft Continuation XXIV: Lino Arruda

INSTALLATION LOG // >
Exhibit Entry Twenty-Two Distortion Dialogue

You don’t view his art. You haunt it.
Or maybe it haunts you.
A whisper under your skin. A trans body mid-incantation. A page breathing back.

Lino Arruda isn’t illustrating — he’s conjuring. Drawing not with ink, but with memory, rupture, and sacred refusal.

Born in São Paulo, Brazil, Lino Arruda is a trans illustrator, comics artist, researcher, and visual poet whose work unravels binaries body and myth, text and flesh, digital and hand. With a PhD in Art and Technology, he merges academic depth with raw, emotional urgency. His visual language is queer not only in subject, but in form: fractured, lyrical, uncontainable.

Arruda came up through Brazil’s radical zine scene, working in risograph, collage, and indie comics before moving into digital art. But even now, his work carries the pulse of DIY each piece feeling more like a stitched-together relic than a polished product. He makes comics that are really diaries. Drawings that are really spells. Art that is really a survival note passed hand to trembling hand.

His work is often autobiographical, but it’s not confessional. It’s myth-making. In his illustrated memoir Monstruosa(s), he documents his gender transition not as a linear story, but as a shifting constellation of moments: annotated body maps, footnoted dreams, conversations with queer theory, conversations with ghosts. Pages bleed between English and Portuguese, theory and tenderness, image and fragment. No panel contains him. Nothing ever stays still.

His digital art process mimics analogue grit. He layers textures that look torn from notebooks, blurs that mimic photocopy ghosts, script-like handwriting that feels like a secret shared mid-panic. He doesn’t clean up his lines. He lets them wander. His color palette is both bruised and blooming, soft violets, pale pinks, washed-out greens, like healing skin. A body remembered and rewritten in pixels.

And the bodies he draws they’re glorious. Incomplete, exaggerated, sacred, grotesque. They have mouths where you expect scars. Nipples where you expect silence. They’re in flux. Transmutation is the rule, not the exception. Sometimes they weep. Sometimes they laugh. Sometimes they just are still and defiant.

Arruda’s work is full of theory, yes but never detached. He draws with his whole self. You’ll find Paul B. Preciado and Gloria Anzaldúa scribbled into the corners of his frames, but also: yearning. Breath. Blood. His art is a conversation — between the academic and the erotic, the political and the deeply personal.

He doesn’t make work for the gallery wall. He makes it for zines passed under the table. For queer kids searching for their own shape. For bodies still under construction. His influence stretches across Latin America’s underground trans art movement not as a leader in the corporate sense, but as a lighthouse: glowing, glitching, whispering, “You’re not alone.”

AI can’t make this kind of work.
Not because it can’t imitate but because it doesn’t ache.
It doesn’t remember the scent of testosterone leaking into your sheets.
It doesn’t know how it feels to look into the mirror and almost see yourself.
It doesn’t carry every rejection inside its bones and still choose to bloom.

Lino Arruda does.

Prompt+Original

Paint a haunting, expressionist-style portrait of a bald, androgynous figure with wide, spiraled eyes and an unsettling stare. The face is rendered in thick, textured brushstrokes of muted purples and greens, with blotches of lavender, lilac, and pale chartreuse blending together to form a ghostly complexion. The background is a distorted field of vertical strokes in sickly yellows, murky greens, and streaks of red-orange that resemble both flame and hair, giving the figure a surreal, almost supernatural aura. The nose appears smudged or bruised, and the mouth is slightly ajar, dark and off-center, as if mid-thought or mid-scream. The overall mood is tense, uncanny, and intimate — like catching someone in the middle of remembering something they shouldn’t have.

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