AHE, NYC

INTERVIEW with Maria Antonia

Claudia Eng Gallery

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CE: Where are you based?

MA: Rio de Janeiro, Brasil

 

CE: How would you title yourself? (painter, multimedia artist, etc)

MA: Artist, Painter. I believe painting is a state of mind. I may be observing, drawing, filming, photographing or sculpting, but the look and language is of painting. It's a dialogue. There's something curious: I'm myopic, so I always see things as if they were paintings. The aesthetic is very similar. I wish my camera could transport this look.

 

CE: What is your making process?

MA: I have the feeling everything I do comes up from my movement. Something bothers or amazes me and then I make studies, sketches, take notes and after a lot of conscious and unconscious process and work I start to see the thing as a thing, as another body that I am able to dialogue with.

I use my body to create scenes and positions I can't understand or find in the world.

I love the aleatory: To observe the configuration of the city and the small details and the trees.

I cut newspapers photographs, print google images and observe random people in the street and make pictures and drawings of strangers acting naturally. I love to zoom in and capture the essence, the unpredictable.

All these materials, together with disposals I collect in the street, goes into my studio and there I am able speak and to expand the dialogue through painting language.

 

CE: What mediums do you currently explore and which new mediums do you have in mind?

MA: Nowadays I work with oil painting, oil pastels, charcoal and graphite, vídeos and I'm starting to fiddle with clay. I want to explore technology, like kinects and other interactive objects.

 

CE: What are your current projects?

MA: I'm developing CarneeCorpo, Flesh and Body, since 2014. It's a complex work and discuss through visceral painting the anguish, torments, gender labels, human's interaction with the relative time-space concept. Last year I found a sub serie called Imagens Irrelevantes, Irrelevant Images, that resignifies online content and is commentaries through painting. Beside the work and process of the studio, I work as a freelancer and consultant with Creative Planning and as a Concept Developer.

 

CE:Upcoming projects?

MA: My biggest desire is to make an artistic residence outside Brazil and dedicate myself, for 6 months minimum, working only for developing my language in painting.

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CE: How do your surroundings inform your art?

MA: Surrounding is the essence of my work. Normally I have a guide or guiding questions, but color, light, weight, sounds, temperature and the aleatory people and situations feed the work. It's totally related. I'm a people person. I love to go to stores to buy my food, ink or whatever I need. I like to be in the street. I talk to the concierge and street vendors. They feed me. They feed the work. I feel like I create, with that, the possibility of the unexpected.

 

CE: What is your relation to nature?

MA: She is my goddess, my friend and my safe harbour. She is different but still similar in form. I don't feel like a need a forest to live in, but I feel her pain when I see the concreted roots and fences defining the space she may have. I live in a city that is by the sea. The ocean is always a good escape. When I i'm in despair I go for a swim and underwater I am able to yell. She holds me. I respect her..  

 

CE: To color?

MA: It's light.

I have a strange relation. I wear a lot of black, as if I could not reflect the light. I putted myself in some kind of mourning in 2014 and just now I'm feeling that I'm being able to undo it. It's also a process.

But in my work, the red is very present. It's flesh, blood, alert, symptoms and feelings. The pink came up when I started discussing the feminine. The greys and blues are now coming up - they are some kind of transition, of cold apathy. The yellow is always there, but never alone, I use him to create the bodie's skins and the greens.

Beside me and my work, the eye without the individual perspective is a doubt. I can't understand how people can't see the colors I see. I do not see much white. It's very hard to ignore the light influence changing the white to something else in the color spectrum.

 

CE: What are some of your earliest art projects?

MA: The paintings Sold, Mamilo, Cum as You Are, Birds I and II and Girl with the dog

 

CE: How do you see your career unfolding?

MA: At the present moment, I see a lot of hard work ahead and I believe that I'll find out a way to make painting to become my full time job, 24/7.

 

CE: Talk about your best/most complete series.

MA: CarneeCorpo, Body and Flesh, started out as some anguish, but the process became the work. I started out understanding I was creating something that was speaking. The paintings was generating dialogue. They are my most uncomfortable paintings and commentaries and the ones I have more difficulty. I believe the serie is not complete, she is gaining life and body now.

Inside CarneeCorpo, I have a work called SOLD. I'm still working on it, but the painting is almost a resume.

 

CE: Where do you see your original works ending up?

MA: In collectors hands, art galleries and contemporary museums

 

CE: Talk about your works in the museum/gallery space.

MA: I believe the work should be in some space that provides opening for experiment, backup on explaining to the public the work and that has no limitation to discuss the uncomfortable and annoying. The display of the paintings should tell a story and create some narrative environment to feed the observer with possibility of dialogue. I have no interest in keeping it only to myself.

 

CE: Do you listen to music as you create?

MA: Depends. Normally I start with music to clean up the studio, expand the colors, organize the brushes.  When I get to work effectively I normally turn it off. I like the silence so I'm able to be fully present in the work and space. There are days that I use her as a drug. It's a trigger. Sometimes tricky...

 

CE: If so, what?

MA: Mostly Chopin, Bach and Nina Simone but sometimes they get to deep and then I shift to Keith Jerard

 

CE: What is your studio like?

MA: It is a Villa's house in the middle of Tijuca's Forest (Floresta da Tijuca). There is a river by close to the house where I often go to clean up my feat. It's a humid tiny studio, 3x3m, or maybe even smaller because of the bathroom and sink. I have 3 walls I am able to use as support for painting. The floor is cold, made of medium square tiles with some marble pattern. I'll change it as soon I can… It's the most comfortable place without chair in it.

 

CE: How often do you create?

MA: I create most of the time. I developed an unconscious process that puts me in this frame of creation state-of-mind. My mind understands the world and then I translate it into creation. If I am away from the studio, I doodle on my sketchbook or put together objects and make pictures of it, I take notes, make small videos and then all this stuff goes into the studio. When I'm in university or when I have a big freelance job to perform I go to the studio 2 to 4 times a week. In my vacations and holidays I usually go every day. My wish is to make this trip to the studio a constant, my only job.

 

CE: Any particular mental space best for your creativity?

MA: When I know the rent and the bills are paid. But mostly, when going to the studio everyday: something happens inside me and I feel like transporting the work to the universe or absorbing the universe and translating it into to the work.

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