Visual identity 2026 · Rafaela Mascaro

What if the present moment had a body?

The visual identity for Maintenant 2026 was created by Brazilian artist Rafaela Mascaro. Entitled Now Bodies, it takes the form of an ecosystem of sentient creatures, conceived as an extension of her “Gang Friends” universe. True figures with shifting identities, these intriguing characters, somewhere between the familiar and the strange, question our relationship with the present. An organic and colourful concept that sets the tone for this new edition: exploring bodies, rediscovering the intensity of colours, and bringing to light what is pulsating in this very moment.

Creatures attuned to the world and the present moment

Now Bodies is part of Maintenant’s approach: to make artistic creation a space for reflecting on the present. Conceived as bridges between the private sphere and the public realm, the characters in Now Bodies absorb, distort and reflect the pulse of life: sounds, music, the time of day, the emotions of a space…

An aesthetic straddling fiction and hyperreality

Direct and deceptively naïve, the aesthetic of Now Bodies plays on a constant tension between intimacy and staging. The saturated, almost artificial colours create an ambiguous visual world where gentleness, strangeness and hyperreality intermingle. In the artistic creation process, artificial intelligence acts as a tool for experimentation in the service of the artistic gesture: it extends Rafaela Mascaro’s vision without ever replacing it, opening up a space where the images fully embrace their ambiguity, on the border between the real and the imaginary.

An invitation to rethink how we live together

By blurring the lines between gender, age and social status, Rafaela Mascaro reveals our identities for what they are: fluid, multifaceted and interconnected. This grey area gives rise to a sensitive and deeply contemporary interpretation of our relationship with technology, representations and identities. Hybrid by nature, they pose a simple question: what if the strange were simply what we have not yet allowed ourselves to see?