Artist Statement

 

 

We are in the quantum and digital age. Therefore, everything is calculated... Well, we think we are… but not really… Because painting, like any movement resulting from artistic tension, cannot be calculated. Can it be defined? Since it unfolds from non-visible, non-palpable dimensions, from changing, even opaque elements, how will words not restrict or betray it? Moreover, like any artistic approach, painting chooses its appearance as much according to the observer as the initiator. We can say that it vibrates from one to the other.

In my pictorial research, I have opened the door to what is not ordinary and yet rubs shoulders with us every day. That is, to the equivocations and to what attracts my sensitive attention in the encounter with the human and non-human world. I try to unfold these ineffable things. To offer to the gaze the vertigo they inflict on me, letting me be guided by their rhythms in this or that direction of colors or shapes. I do not conceptually presuppose future directions, but I give importance to their presence in my pictorial experience. In this way, I expose a certain resistance to the mentalization of art by favoring its impromptu, random and sensitive side. I highlight the resurgent forms of my encounters, whether physical, literary, poetic or dreamlike, memorial.

 

Technique and mediums

 

For my drawings, I always use Indian ink, because it doesn't fade in the light. Generally, I work on granulated paper (designed for watercolor) and less often on smooth paper. I mainly use small or medium formats, because they require more attention because of the space constraint imposed. This constraint is enriching.

 

For my paintings, I mainly use oil paint. As a lover of reading, I sometimes enrich certain canvases with pasted texts, taken from books or newspapers. These techniques allow me to play with textures, contrasts, transparencies and the unexpected. I work with the material in disordered layers, in the search for a depth that is more evocative than descriptive. To account for the constant interference of the infinitely random in our human universe, I choose to link a figurative approach to that of abstraction, and vice versa. For me, it's a question of playing with one with the other to open up to the unpredictable, to what can be confusing with an image that is too fast. Open to the imagination without trying to control it. It is also important for me not to fully control the process, to expose my contemporary sensibility and reap the benefits. The whole advantage of the oil technique is that it can be applied and removed, melted or dispersed, accentuated or attenuated, in a word, explored on the canvas. Play with multiple variances always possible.

 

Creative approach

 

In painting, I move forward in a chaotic way by deciding whether to keep this or that line, this or that flat area, this or that shape in relation to what I am looking for. By choosing multiple shades and lines that mistreat the figuration, I could get lost. But by letting myself be crossed by what the images bring me, little by little, I find their place in the pictorial whole. He progresses by training me with him.

 

In drawing, I don't have the possibility to go back. The ink does not fade on the paper. As with watercolor, once the line is laid, it can no longer be removed. You must deal with it, find other ways to adjust the drawing to make it acceptable to me. This constraint creates amusing surprises: it opens to humor and leads me to play even more with possible forms to evoke the human and what is bothering him.

 

In painting as in drawing, I navigate between nuance and vigor, precision and vagueness, between what is said and what remains silent. The mastery of the gesture joins the randomness of it. This process, long and delicate in painting but fast and unexpected in drawing, is my way of revealing the sensitive. The figures (characters, animals, landscapes, trees or objects) are silent encounters, with no beginning or end, captured in a perpetual momentum. They fade away and recreate themselves, like a microcosm in constant metamorphosis. Transparencies and continuities of colors or lines serve as a support for an infinite game of possibilities, where the invisible mixes with the visible. I use the resources of abstraction to reveal presences and rhythms that can be guessed without being shown. I want to celebrate the subtle interferences that connect us to others, to the living and the dead, and to the environment, bright or dark, that surrounds us. Through the play of light and shadow, I look for the vibratory lines in the bodies of the living. I look for the abundant and tenacious randomness that animates them. There is a dialogue between my gesture (thicker, thinner, offbeat, more curved, etc.) and what this line creates as a sensation in me. In drawing as in painting, I discover what I am looking for while I am doing it. I explore what I draw or paint during this action. Is this my way of loving the living, accepting the impromptu to endure its shadow?

 

My Artist Name

 

I am happy to honor the name given to me by my husband's family sometime after my arrival in their country. It seems to me that this name, Dembiano, expresses with all its flavor my pleasure in sharing different ways of tasting the cultures of our world.

 

My influences

 

Attracted to Impressionist paintings at a very young age, I appreciated, through their contacts, several ways of revealing the sensible world. Maturity opened me up to other painters, more classical or more modern. I integrated the possibility of abstraction as an alternative pictorial reality. Thus, my Brazilian childhood and Western painting in its diversity created a breeding ground, which I enriched through the practice of holistic therapy (Gestalt-therapy). Finally, through my encounters and readings in Central and West Africa, over a period of twenty years, I have identified the underground forces that inspire these people, just as they animate ours. My artistic work ventures to touch the rhythms of openings and closures of powerful elements of life. Because if immaterial forces influence our lives, how can we depict them?