Solange Mariel

Artist Statement

My work hinges on my childhood memories, it is my intent to visually communicate an aesthetic that will take the viewer on a journey to a place I call home. I desire to open a window, exposing the viewer to fragmented layers of memories in segments of thoughts. To construct this universally understood place I seek a commonality between forms and shapes on the painted surface, through color: diluted pigment-occupying space, creating atmosphere, revealing and concealing visual pathways.

I was seventeen when I left my hometown. My grandmother painted, but we never spoke about it. This body of work is an abstraction of a place I call home, Ouro Preto (Minas Gerais, Brazil), it reflects experiences and observation. The work is of memory. The memory is why I choose one color over another, or one shape rather than other. It is about loss but also of joy. The work is a way to gain re-entry…to not let go.

“It is to feel sadness about something, or to feel a sense of loss and longing for somebody or something that is no longer there. At night in wintertime, the fog is so thick you can cut it with scissors. I can smell the eucalyptus trees. That smell comes back through my memory and the swaying back and forth is part of that smell. It was a place colorfully decorated with patchwork architecture…confetti-like fragments… big huge cobblestones that are uneven, there are gaps in between… you walk up the hill and you look down, there it is---rooftops, more streets, more roads that are beyond more of the roads you just walked up…they wind up and down…there are crooked houses… hills and valleys…its very flowing in and out.…blue sky that at night seems to enter the room and all become one…This place was the place that held love and acceptance for me…all those things that happened afterwards were not bad, it’s just that that was the place that was home. There is always this meeting, this passing by other people, it is repetitious…”

“The painted image makes what is absent-in that it happened far away or long ago-present. The painted image delivers what it depicts to the here and now. It collects the world and brings it home.” John Berger