Luísa Matsushita

Luísa Matsushita still starts her mornings creating, but these days there is no stage waiting. She makes herself a large coffee and sketches the small drawings she calls her “minis,” deciding which ideas she wants to live with long enough to turn into paintings. It is a quieter rhythm for the woman millions first met as Lovefoxxx, the frontwoman of Cansei de Ser Sexy, better known as CSS, the Brazilian indie band that emerged from São Paulo in the early 2000s and went on to play international stages including Glastonbury and Fuji Rock.

More than two decades later, Matsushita is looking back at the city where so much of that story began. Her 2026 solo exhibition, Tudo Que Eu Sei, Eu Aprendi à Noite (“Everything I Know, I Learned at Night”), turns her memories of São Paulo into paintings about nightlife, youth and the freedom she found there.

Matsushita moved to São Paulo at 16 and settled around Baixo Augusta, the downtown area centered on Rua Augusta, known for its bars, clubs and alternative cultural scene. She worked in fashion, went out at night and absorbed the world that would eventually surround the birth of CSS. 

© Luísa Matsushita

Painting came later. Matsushita began at 29 while she was still touring and slowly built another creative life alongside music. By 2025, her work was appearing in São Paulo and Paris, including exhibitions at Dover Street Market Paris and Maison La Roche, the celebrated Paris home designed by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. What had begun between tours was becoming the center of her artistic life.

That evolution found its most personal expression in August 2026 at Teatro Cultura Artística, a landmark São Paulo theater designed by Brazilian modernist architect Rino Levi. Matsushita’s eleven paintings inaugurated ABERTO Solo, a new program bringing contemporary artists into architecturally significant spaces.  The exhibition also gave new life to a space with its own unfinished history: Levi had designed an art gallery inside the theater in the 1950s, but it was never used as one. Matsushita’s exhibition finally opened the space as its architect had envisioned. She also created a 15-meter intervention for the theater’s lobby.

For audiences who first knew her as Lovefoxxx, the transformation may look dramatic. For Matsushita, it has been unfolding for more than a decade. Music introduced her to the world; painting has brought her back to the streets, colors, and nights that shaped her, this time with Luísa Matsushita firmly at the center of the frame.