Fragments is a series of monotypes by Julia da Mota that emerged from her master’s research project Cidade entre olhares (City Within Views), developed at the University of São Paulo. This body of work investigates the city of São Paulo as a fragmented landscape—one composed of fleeting visual relations and spatial voids. Through the process of walking and observing, da Mota collected fragments of the urban fabric: walls, empty lots, blind façades, traces of demolition. These pieces of the city became starting points for visual reflection, where the artist sought to reconstruct a sense of landscape from partial views and residual spaces, revealing how absence and interruption are constitutive of urban experience.

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In Fragments, the artist distilled these observations into an essential graphic language. The monotype technique allowed for both immediacy and unpredictability, enabling da Mota to explore the tension between control and accident that mirrors the unstable nature of the city itself. Each impression became a variation—a reinterpretation of a remembered space—where density and emptiness, opacity and light, coexist in delicate balance. The works oscillate between figuration and abstraction, evoking architectural volumes, shadowed corners, and open skies, without ever fully describing them. What remains is an atmosphere of silence and suspension, in which the viewer’s perception completes what the image only suggests.

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Conceptually, Fragments embodies the artist’s pursuit of the “vazio”—the void—as both a spatial and poetic condition. For da Mota, the void is not mere absence, but a generative space that allows the image, the city, and the self to breathe. By translating urban impressions into minimal, layered compositions, she proposes a renewed way of seeing the city—less as a continuous whole, and more as a constellation of perceptions. The series thus operates as a meditation on the relationship between vision and place, where every fragment becomes a threshold between presence and disappearance, the visible and the imagined.