Manuela Viera-Gallo

For the last two decades I have been preoccupied with visual stories mostly informed by my life experiences and shaped through a distinctly feminine voice.  The current social and political volatility that we have been observing in our recent past in the United States feels very close to my experience as a Latina immigrant who witnessed how the loss of leaving something behind marks you forever. My artistic practice is multi disciplinary and rooted in themes that I have been exploring continuously which range from social instability, the American dream, addiction to technology, domestic violence, surveillance to rhetoric of belonging.  

The protagonist of a woman keeps appearing in the series of paintings that I have been developing for the last two years. She is characterized as someone who has a multitude of voices: the one who protests, the silenced one, the misrepresented, stuck in the family constellation, the sensual and the one who has to mask behind many shields. In this year of losses I decided to indulge in portraits drawn from art history, placed in fantastically colorful landscapes. Visual pleasure was a driving force while giving homage to the female form in a way I believe is most dignified.

In Tutti Frutti series have a colorful and tropical palette that make the artist transcend the cold and dark reality of Brooklyn. Paintings are a defense mechanism against a complicated reality. It is the quest to reach the garden of delights, the paradise of abundance. But there is an element of tragedy that is also present in the work, particularly in the faces of the women who reach that state of nirvana but with marks present on the bodies pierced by the fruit, the scars of past struggles, the lost gazes of an affected spirit that cannot be erased.

This series of paintings was also influenced by the pigments of the Mapuche, an indigenous group in South America with a rich tradition in textile work, where women were in charge of spinning and weaving wool. Transmitting knowledge from generation to generation through imitation of gestures, these women played an important economic and cultural role in different parts of South America.