MARCELA FLORIDO
Whose work are you loving these days?
In April, I saw Beatriz González's retrospective and talk at Perez Art Museum in Miami, and I can't stop thinking about it. Gonzales was born in 1938 in Colombia, and she is still making extremely relevant work. Her virtuosity and sophistication as a painter are obvious. At the same time, she explores - in a teasing way - questions specific to Latin American politics: the state of culture in our corner of the world, and its continued relationship to the legacy of colonialism. These questions also drive my art, so I feel a deep kinship with her. I bought the exhibition's catalogue and left it open in my studio ever since, as I paint.
Luchita Hurtado is another phenomenal Latin American painter who has profoundly impacted my new body of work. In her self-portraiture, Hurtado represents her body as an element of nature, referencing and building upon Latin America's particular, but deep, embrace of surrealism.
The ideas and images of that movement are also deeply lodged in my imaginary, and so it’s especially moving to see them used in her work. Hurtado also has a way of depicting her breasts, her legs, and her feet as if they were monuments. This decontextualizes those body parts, giving them so much power and beauty on their own terms. I would love for my figures to convey some of this monumental quality.
I have also been trying to channel Teresinha Soares' vibrant energy in my work. I heard of Teresinha because she is the mother of another Brazilian artist I hugely admire: Valeska Soares. I am very inspired by the transgressive, combative, and anti-patriarchal character of her work. The representation of the female body is the primary interest of all her pieces, a primal political gesture amongst many.
What book is on your nightstand?
[Haruki] Murakami's After the Quake. I found it on my roommate's bookshelf and grabbed it without thinking - mostly because of its title. I had never read him before, and I’d never experienced an earthquake. But I was intrigued: I was interested in the idea of events that happen ‘beneath the ground’ - beyond our sight and immediate comprehension - shaping us in such defining ways. Murakami's short stories, like good paintings, prove that small fragments can evoke entire worlds of thought and feeling.
Your practice in 5 #
#ContemporaryBrazilianPainting
#Figurativepainting
#Selfportraiture
#Latinamericanarthistory
#DiasporaArt
Your practice in ideal 5 #
#Fuckthelegacyofgeometricabstractionincontrewmporarybrazilianpainting
#fucktheleganceofmonocromaticgreometricabstractionusingcolorwithoutfear
#bringuingbacktherepresentationofthebrazilianlandscapewithoutfear
#rethinkingthetabooofrepresentingthebrazizlianbodywithoutexploringideasofexoticismandoversexualization
#drawingononeshistoryandfindingkinshipisagoodthingandnotsomethingtobeavoidedknowyourownhistory
What's on your mind?
I’m thinking a lot about the representation of one's own body through painting, by female painters especially. I am tempted to say ‘female self-portraiture’, but also want to avoid the territory of 'selfies' and/or the performative aspects of online identities. That is not what's on my mind. Painting and figuration: that is what is at stake for me.
To depict oneself can be both intimately poetic and political. It can be an investigation of the broader social structures through which ideas of ‘self’ and ‘otherness’ are created. I arrived at this topic unexpectedly. Painting naturally took me there, so I was probably interested in it all along.
I never know what I’m going to paint until I start painting. Painting is the way I think. So it is even more exciting to see some of my female peers, who went to the Slade with me, also making this unexpected turn. We were close in London; we shared studios, teachers, ideas, and all those things that are very formative to a body of work. And that intimacy emerged years later as this shared tendency toward self-portraiture.
How does the body - yours and others' - influence your work?
For me, everything begins with the body. When I talk with so someone, we are constantly influencing each other not by our words but by our presence, our energy, and our movements. The body learns so fast and the conscious or verbal mind cannot keep up. There is a process of identification, incorporation, projections, fantasies. As a painter, I just trust mine. I know that every encounter has a potent effect on me.
A simple example is my accent. I am Brazilian born and raised, but I have lived outside Brazil for many years, in London, New York, and Kenya. In each of these places, I learned and unlearned English.
Every day I unconsciously imitate new accents, switch back and forth without realizing between so many different English-speaking personas. Now, when I see my tongue surprise me by rolling in different ways, it amuses me. I trust my eyes and my hand to do the same: to be tirelessly learning new colours, new shapes, new ways of seeing and bringing it all to my studio. The body is working things out but not necessarily resolving them.
And all of that is reflected the characters in my paintings. They have always been female: fictional characters, who I suppose are a hybrid of myself and other women my life. We are all one and the same, but in each painting, we exist differently.
Marcela lives and works in Brooklyn, NY
October 2019
