New York-based artist Fernando Carpaneda, has participated in important international art exhibitions including: Bridge Art Fair / Art Basel-Miami 2008, has works in the permanent collections of The Museum of Sex and The Leslie Lohman Gay Art Foundation in New York, The Erotic Heritage Museum in Las Vegas among others. Carpaneda is represented internationally by The kymara Gallery and MF Gallery and is part of the Anté Art Movement led by Billy Name (Andy Warhol Superstars). Carpaneda is an artist born in Brasília, Brazil. He works with clay sculptures. His main theme is always the human being. He watches people in the streets, bars, concerts, and places where people sell their bodies. Fernando makes portraits of rent boys, punks, junkies, thieves and outcasts. Instead of attaching himself to muses, he focuses on male nudes to compose his art pieces, having the human being, the masculine, as the main goal in his work. All his portraits are like a relic, a holy place, a moment caught in time. He uses objects that have a connection to the portrayed person to composing his work, such as cigarette butts, condoms, beer cans, underwear, semen, empty toothpaste boxes. In other words, things that are part of these people's real world, and his own. He uses such objects and remains as a beginning for his portraits. Clay is used as technique. He uses it the same way it was used in the 17th Century (for painting baroque saint images). He even dresses his sculptures with cloth from his own clothes. He creates and sews all the clothing that is used in the pieces. He also includes human hair to some of the pieces, his own hair (this was very often done in the 17th Century), and a current relic that has its value in time, as to maintain a time, ordinary people who lived it. Fernando writes about his pieces using street language as a background, another urban element often used. His connection to the artwork is important to any creative process. He believes that the artist himself is a piece of art. He has been going to places where the portrayed people use to go for the past 27 years. Remembrances are part of his work. Every little thing is part of him: his lovers, his disappointments, his experiences with drugs, his life in the streets, and so forth. Fernando depends on all of this to create art; he does not exist without these people.