Karla Ruas ( 1988) was born in Montes Claros, MG - Brazil, currently living in Porto - PT
My work is situated between drawing and painting, which explores themes such as the body, nature, ancestral and surreal symbolism, and the studies on the psyche which have been persistent interests over time.
My work is drawn to figurative pieces that emerge from my imagination and experience as a black woman, mixing my studies about psychoanalysis, anticolonialism, and art history with my fascination and interest in the natural world.
My work is drawn to figurative pieces that emerge from my imagination and experience as a black woman, mixing my studies about psychoanalysis, anticolonialism, and art history with my fascination and interest in the natural world.
I use paper as my principal support and work mostly with watercolour, which is often combined with other pigments such as gouache, acrylic, graphite, and pastel oil to bring out other contrasts and textures in my work.
In my current body of work, I strive to establish a connection and an emotional atmosphere by creating distinct and rhizomatic versions of myself, mixing the female body with natural elements to create new beings. My work often serves as pictorial extensions of my emotional states and ancestors' backgrounds, creating imaginary subconscious sceneries. I want to invite these bodies to interact with natural elements, domestic spaces, and open-air, creating new scenarios. Sometimes they interact with each other, and on other occasions, they observe the world as an active movement, creating new potentials, new spaces, and new ways of belonging to and existing in it. This work is supposed to exist in the timeless present, without bringing any certainty regarding its temporality, whether it is linked to the past or the future. It has no intention of being situated in time as we know it, and it invites the viewer to explore and interpret the artwork freely.