Edgard Barbosa is a Brazilian-born artist based in New York whose work examines how commercial imagery and urban surfaces shape memory, identity, and visual culture.

Drawing from advertisements, fashion photography, and public visual residue, he reconstructs discarded imagery into abstract compositions where order and fragmentation sit in uneasy balance. His work has been exhibited across the United States, including projects in New York, California, Washington, and Indiana.

For TORN, Barbosa is submitting works from ST-TLS, a body of work built from iPhone photographs and scanned fragments of torn urban posters.

The series treats the city as a layered communal surface, shaped by repeated acts of posting and removal. Barbosa approaches digital images through an analog logic of assembly. He collects, cuts, repeats, and reorganizes these fragments until they begin to carry the language of both street collage and digital interruption. The final works retain a flatness that feels photographic and compressed, while still preserving the visual language of torn paper. The series resists pure chaos by using grids as temporary structures for images already marked by rupture.

Growing up as an immigrant who relied on visual language before fluency in English, Barbosa treats commercial and public imagery as a shared vocabulary that can be dismantled and rebuilt. In ST-TLS, the torn surface becomes both material and metaphor: a place where memory, consumer culture, and abstraction become unstable, familiar, and newly legible.