Featured Artist

Marina Clemente | Paris, France
@marinaclem_art

What touches me deeply nowadays is the increasing disconnection that people experience between and within themselves.

The development of technology, which is meant to increase communication, is paradoxically limiting the situations that favor genuine contact and is creating a very fast paced reality.

For example, to find out where a road is located, we do not need to talk with strangers anymore: a search on Google maps on our portable devices is enough.

Robots can call us from an unknown numbers. To book an appointment we don`t even need to call, it is enough to fill in the form on the site.

As a consequence of this new paradigm of communication, eye contact is not a natural habit anymore, so we try to avoid it, because it makes us feel terribly vulnerable.

I see vulnerability as the ability to allow myself to feel and express imperfection and chaos, in the form of diametrically opposite feelings and doubts.

Today we tend to wrap ourselves up in our individual bubble instead and we get used to act and live alone, displaying an external image of ourselves of order, perfection and extreme self-confidence.

This way though, we disconnect not only from others but also from ourselves: we rush all day forgetting to feel what’s happening within us.

At the end of the day, what’s left for me are fragments of accidentally heard or read quotes, dialogues, phrases and words. I make notes of them and I use them as source of inspiration and as starting point for my paintings, because of their inherent possibility of different interpretation.

From this chaos my anthropomorphic subjects and the titles of my works arise.

My aim is to integrate the chaos of abstract strokes, words, taken out of context with the order of the figurative painting, creating a new connection through disconnection.

My subjects are images of hypothetic humans who become themselves, as a context, as an anthropomorphic form of chaos, or as a story, that can be perceived on a sensual level.

This gives the viewer many options for interpretation and the ability to experience vulnerability at a safe distance.