He makes unpredictable displacements and produces assemblages in a tone of parody distilling his acute observations of the world, from technology to rubbish.” [4] writes Brazilian art critic Ligia Canongia.

As a teenager, he was very close to his aunt, Mara Chaves who worked for the architects Wilson Reis Netto and José Zanine Caldas [pt]; this triggered his training in architecture and urbanism (1979) at Universidade Santa Ursula where he attended classes with Lygia Pape who had an important influence on him.

[5] Marcos Chaves' most notable photographic work, Eu só vendo a vista (1997), takes as its main subject Rio de Janeiro's iconic view of the Sugar Loaf mountain found on tourist postcards and collectively associated with the landscape of the city.

As an attempt to restore a relationship with it, Chaves takes this image to the field of art and transposes onto it a sentence which holds many semantic ambiguities: Eu só vendo a vista.

Playing around with the words vista (view, eyesight), the meaning of the expression à vista (cash) as well as vendo (depending on the conjugation means selling, seeing, and concealing) one could read the different sentences: This apparently simple yet highly charged conceptual work holds within it, strong statements and criticism about art, photography and the position of an artist in society, including within the art and photography fields ruled by market transactions of selling and buying views on/ of the world.

[6][7] For the last three decades, Marcos Chaves has been photographing the holes in Rio de Janeiro's streets and the ready-made sculptures they become when residents fill them up with objects as a warning for pedestrians and cars.

For each hole is a liability in the city's public power, a symbolic fissure that is opened, a popular homage to the dangers of faulting politics that the social imaginary represents as a fracture.

[…]The photos of the holes are self-representations, in which object and idea couple in their raw material (the piece lifted in the street) and in its category of thought (the photographic and conceptual registration), but in order to arrive at perverse tautologies, which never stop incurring on several levels of understanding.

A latex carnival mask the artist bought in the central street market of Rio de Janeiro covers the face from just below the eyes.

Still, the mask has the potential of absorbing many of the issues that arouse the interest of the art territory in its modern acceptation: illusion, myth, allegory and simulacrum.

The figure of the mask is not extraneous to the work of Marcos Chaves, and this has already been observed in the interventions that he carried out at Castelinho do Flamengo in 2000 when, using make-up, false eyelashes and other adornments, he transformed the eclectic-style sculptures into lively and hilarious images, like transvestites.

There, he effected a deviation of the static nature of the statues, updating and ironizing the obsolete character of academic art, in addition to underscoring how much from eclecticism – which transits amidst various styles – was appropriated by the post-modern world.—Ligia Canongia[13] This work is an installation made of wooden, metal, concrete and plastic elements: sculptures of gym and weight lifting equipment.