The paintings by Larissa de Souza, an artist represented by HOA Galeria, also permeate the field of affective memory, based on the notion of belonging as a black and Afro-Brazilian woman. Religiosity, sorority, relationships and ties with other important characters in her life, especially her grandmother and mother, guide a large part of her production, which subverts the notion that “all works must be political and about violence”, proposing another kind of narrative as a political act.
“I believe that many of my creations arise from personal and, in turn, collective memory. I realize that people feel represented, with their memories awakened when seeing my painting. Painting the memories was the mechanism I had to get closer to my ancestors. It also made me look at the present ancestor and what he can be for my future ones. I paint my memory so I don't forget where I came from”, says Souza to seLecT_ceLesTe. In A Ligação (2022), a painting from the unprecedented series Paredes Que Contam Histórias, on display at her first solo show in New York, at the Albertz Benda gallery, Larissa de Souza portrays a woman talking on the phone, sitting in a chair. Departing from visual references of the platbands, colonial architectural detail of popular houses in the northeastern hinterland, and thinking about love and how it is constituted, the artist goes beyond the perimeter of the frame, recurrent in his production, to achieve another spatiality on the canvas, now without limits.
“The stories told in this series are stories that I saw, lived and that many women still live inside their homes. In each house there is a story being told. When I look at a peeling wall and its overlapping layers of paint, I think about the passage of time and wonder what these walls saw”, she says.
The artist says that, when she started painting A Ligação, she was taken by a feeling of reconciliation and the brushstrokes were telling a story from that. “A woman in front of a window, sitting on a chair inside the house, stares into space while holding the phone. This image can have several stories: news of a loved one, maybe a reconciliation (laughs), missing someone who lives far away... Not thinking about the painting while I'm painting, looking at the result, makes me reflect on so many stories that she could have. One of my reflections is that, in the old days, receiving a phone call was a very serious matter, because not everyone had the money to pay the telephone bill. I think I portrayed a moment of a very important connection, expected or unexpected. Mystery."
The new series is, in a way, an expansion and deepening of the previous one, entitled Retratos Perdidos (2021), in which the artist addresses the impossibility of accessing photographic images and how this was part of the historical erasure of the Afro-Brazilian population. “Often, the memory of our ancestors is marked by the photo on the work card. But the development that this question brought was to think about photopainting, which is also a more accessible way of achieving photography”, says Larissa.
The oval frames and the predominant green background brought this symbol to the top of each house painted in the Paredes Que Contam Histórias series, with the aim of portraying the hidden feeling in each scene. The artist says that, when she started painting A Ligação, she was taken by a feeling of reconciliation and the brushstrokes were telling a story from that. “A woman in front of a window, sitting on a chair inside the house, stares into space while holding the phone. This image can have several stories: news of a loved one, maybe a reconciliation (laughs), missing someone who lives far away... Not thinking about the painting while I'm painting, looking at the result, makes me reflect on so many stories that she could have. One of my reflections is that, in the old days, receiving a phone call was a very serious matter, because not everyone had the money to pay the telephone bill. I think I portrayed a moment of a very important connection, expected or unexpected. Mystery."
