Padrões do Mundo: ReCreate Exhibition

"Padrões do Mundo" was the first solo exhibition by Carla Lopes, designer and founder of ReCreate.

The exhibition marked a more artistic dimension of a body of work that has been developed since 2016 — a continuous exploration of reclaimed advertising banners, manual construction, graphic composition and material transformation.

For Carla, patterns have always been present. They appear in notebooks, books, sketches, tests and small models that have surrounded her creative process for years. Some of these studies slowly found their way into ReCreate pieces. Others remained waiting for a different scale, a different surface and a different kind of presence.

Padrões do Mundo became that space.

From Object to Panel

In this exhibition, Carla Lopes reinterpreted patterns through panels made from reclaimed advertising banners.

The material, already familiar through years of work at ReCreate, was approached in a more vertical and experimental way. Instead of becoming a bag, wallet or functional object, the banner became surface, rhythm and optical texture.

The panels explore geometry, repetition and contrast. Forms appear, disappear and shift through the tension between colour, structure and manual making. What begins as discarded material becomes a visual field — dense, tactile and full of movement.

This work brings together Carla’s experience as a graphic designer and her deep knowledge of reclaimed banner material. Its resistance, flexibility, thickness and limits are not hidden. They become part of the composition.

A Manual Language

"Padrões do Mundo" is also a tribute to manual knowledge.

The exhibition looks at pattern not only as decoration, but as a form of thinking. Through repetition, tension and rhythm, the hand creates systems. The gesture becomes structure. The material gains another kind of depth.

Across seven patterns, more than two square metres of material that could have been discarded were transformed into panels with identity and presence. Each one carries its own rhythm, influence and visual memory.

This is where the work connects deeply with ReCreate’s design language: the ability to look at an existing material and understand what it can still become.

A World Built Through Patterns

"Padrões do Mundo" opened a new space within Carla Lopes’ practice.

It allowed her to move beyond the scale of the everyday object and explore the artistic potential of a material she knows intimately. It was also a way of expanding the limits of her own creativity — using the same reclaimed banners, but allowing them to speak through pattern, verticality and visual complexity.

The exhibition reveals a central idea in ReCreate’s work: design can transform matter into meaning.

A discarded surface can become image.
A repeated gesture can become language.
A material with one past life can gain another form of permanence.