Please join us for an opening reception with the artist on Saturday, June 13th, from 5 to 9 PM.
Live Painting Demonstration
Sunday, June 14, 1–4 PM
On Show June 13–July 4
On Sunday, June 14th, from 1–4 PM, we’re excited to host Hayashi for a live painting demonstration, offering a glimpse into the artist’s process and evolving decisions at the easel. Guests are invited to experience the work as it unfolds in real time.
In his debut U.S. solo exhibition, Brazilian artist Rafael Hayashi transforms fear from a private burden into a sacred act of guardianship. His paintings gather at the threshold between childhood terror, paternal love, and mythic protection, giving shape to the fears that devotion awakens: absence, inability to provide, death, and the monumental responsibility of keeping the beloved safe.
Across blurred faces, masked children, primal gods, and vigilant guardians, Hayashi builds protectors inside the darkness. His figures emerge as if forged from elemental forces of smoke, or clay or fire, made to confront the forces we cannot always face alone. These are strange, luminous beings, birthed from tenderness, vulnerability, and the courage to remain open in the presence of fear.
Rooted in Hayashi’s own memories of childhood fear and transformed by the experience of fatherhood, the exhibition considers fear not as weakness, but as one of love’s most profound consequences. To love is to become vulnerable to loss. To protect is to admit that danger exists. The child who once needed protection becomes the father trying, impossibly, to become protection itself. In this tension, Hayashi’s work finds its power. His paintings do not erase fear; they dignify it by asking what it might become in the hands of love: a metamorphosis from fear into watchful guardians and defenders.
Hayashi reflects:
“I was never very brave. As a child, I was terrified of sleeping alone; I always felt threatened by figures that would come to haunt me in the middle of the night. Until my early teens, I could only sleep with the blankets covering me from head to toe. I remember that when we were kids, my younger sister would go first whenever we needed to enter dark spaces. Now, becoming a father, my fears haven't disappeared, but have rather transformed into different ones—fears of no longer being present for my children’s upbringing; the fear of death, either parent or child; the fear of not being able to provide everything I believe they deserve.
“My art plays a fundamental role in visualizing these fears, and perhaps in an attempt to create my own protectors: Beings that will fight for me when I am scared and that will clear my path in the dark. I paint and sculpt figures that will stand before me, much like the figureheads at the front of ancient ships, offering their protection and warding off all the dangers along the journey.”
Through painting and sculpture, Hayashi creates beings that stand before him, clearing a path through the dark. In doing so, he offers a deeply human vision of protection: love made visible, fear given form, and devotion strong enough to walk forward through uncertainty.