Patrick Lima Alex

Lives and works in Fortaleza - Zone 1, Fortaleza - Ceará, Brazil

Artist statement

I paint the body as an archive. What happens to a person does not disappear. It settles — into posture, into the angle of a shoulder, into the way a body holds itself when it expects to be touched. I am interested in that residue, and in the fact that it can be read without ever being explained. The central operation is modular repetition. I build figures from small organic modules that resemble stones, cells, scars, deposits of paint. They cover skin, face, arms, back, hands and legs until the figure oscillates between a body, a map, a hide and a geological formation. The modules are not ornament. Each unit resembles the others without becoming identical, and their repetition turns skin into a surface of inscription, making sensible a memory that has no direct image. Colour arrives in intense fields, or is withheld. It lifts the figure out of any particular story, so that the painting sustains a presence rather than illustrating an episode. Postures are withdrawn, profiles turned, gestures interrupted. Nothing is smoothed over: the surface keeps its own strata the way a body keeps its scars. A fossil body is not a dead body. It is a scar, or a stone lodged in flesh — matter that preserves the traces without disclosing the events that produced them. The withholding is what makes the trace productive: part is seen while part stays unreachable. That is how most of what forms us actually reaches us. The work is now beginning to leave the canvas. I am translating the modules...

Artwork