Paulo Lima Buenoz, aka Buennos

Paulo Lima Buenoz is both an artist and musician. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree at the School of Music of the State University of São Paulo, Brazil in 1985. From 1987 through 1993 he performed in concerts, taught both art and music, and created five minimalist, site-specific installations in Brazil. Branco ou O Visível e o Invisível (White or the Visible and the Invisible), for example, was composed of fabric, quicklime, essence of lily, wood, and plastic cups. Then Buenoz came to the U.S. where he earned an M.F.A. at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1994.
     In 1994 Buenoz created three installations at SUNY/Buffalo, including 1 + 1 = 3, The Artist and His Studio, and Blank, or Buildings Cannot Produce Art, and his drawings were shown in the one person exhibition, The Same and The Other, in the UB Art Department Gallery. Dis-Placement, his installation at Hallwalls in March 1996, included white chalk drawings on the walls and floor of an imaginary map of his experience, suggesting links in space and time transformed by memory.
     In 1997, the artist created an ambitious, memorable work titled Dis-Ease: An Installation by Paulo Buennos at the Burchfield-Penney Art Center. Through sensory and allegorical means, his site-specific installation addressed “the paradox of love and loss that the AIDS crisis has brought to bear on us all." Two gallery-sized rooms were built—their walls covered in red pigment and red velvet, their floors covered in gravel. An antiseptic witch hazel scent filled the first room, where visitors were invited to wash their hands in a basin placed on a spare table. The romantic scent of roses emanated from pillows clustered on the floor in the second room. The contrasts between the two evoked mixed emotions about risk and desire.
     After returning to his native Brazil, Buenoz changed the spelling of his surname, earned a Doctorate in Clinical Psychology, and continued to exhibit in museums and public spaces. Since 2007, he also has taught at the Universidade Federal de Uberlândia and oversaw its art museum, Museu Universitário de Arte as its director for many years.