Brazilian Artist Edu Monteiro Covers His Head In Various Items And Takes Bizarre Self Portraits

For Brazilian artist Edu Monteiro a cigarette isn't just for smoking, bananas aren't just for eating, and sand isn't just for the beach. All of these items and many more are props which Monteiro uses to wrap around his head.

He then takes freaky self-portraits which come across as both alarming and funny—how else can you respond to a man with an octopus on his head?

The sculptural series is called Sensory Self Portraits and plays around with textures, which can be both organic and artificial, changing not only our perception of Monteiro, but also his own sensory experience while undertaking the portraits.

Writing about the project he says:

My sensorial self-portraits are personal fictions. The impulse emerged from a sensory mask made by a Brazilian plastic artist Lygia Clark. With this impulse came the desire to try to manipulate and to wear an object that forced a change of sensations and self-analysis.

So I started to create my own masks, not only inspired by the poetics used by Lygia, but also by different artists throughout the history of art who had marked my memory, such as Hélio Oiticica.

Carrying forward their ideas, I have created self-transformations, rather than creating artwork requiring the participation of others, as Clark and Oiticica did. I offer my own body and mind to similar experiences as the ones Lygia worked in the "file memory" of her patients: their fears and weaknesses, through the senses.