Cordiais is an online database that correlates historical paintings that depict Brazilian women with the results of a facial recognition algorithm that measures these characters’ happiness, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, and fear. This quantitative data is transformed into rectangles whose areas represent the amount of each emotion relative to the size of the original work, leading to a form of color-blocks abstract paintings-data-visualization. This irreverent process responds to the desire of rendering the digital body and the underlying mechanisms of power and representation, inherent to late surveillance capitalism, in more tangible forms.

Access the Interactive Website.

This project won the 2021 Marcantonio Vilaça Award from the Brazilian National Foundation for the Arts. It was developed in partnership with Thiago Hersan.

Studies for happiness, 2021. Acrylic paint, latex and golden leaf.

Studies for a Happy Nude, 2022. Exhibition view at Museum Without Walls, Queens University, Kingston, Canada. These paintings together with a tablet with the Cordiais website, show the amount of happiness of the painting Estudo de Nu (Dario Villares Barbosa, 1905), which is part of this database. According to the algorithm used, this woman is 8% happy.

Linda & Divani, 2023. Exhibition view at Centro Cultural São Paulo, Brazil. In this installation, all the basic emotions (happiness, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger and fear) for the painting Linda Divani are quantified, with a lexicon of colors and materials for each of the emotions. The percentage of each emotion is engraved in acrylic and the painting is displayed on a monitor.

Linda & Divani, 2024. Exhibition view at Niterói Contemporary Art Museum, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Photo by Gabi Carrera.

Linda Divani’s joy (detail). Mineral pigment, latex and engraved acrylic.