Rodrigo Zrazani

Lives and works in Nanaimo, BC, Canada

Artist statement

My research focuses on bodies in displacement and on the way memory carries people and places across distance. Many of the images I paint come from Brazil, where I grew up. They are connected to people I knew, places I remember, or situations that stayed with me without my fully understanding why. I now live in Canada, and that distance has changed the way these images return. They encounter the landscape around me and begin to exist differently. I work from photographs and memory, while allowing the painting to move away from both. I am not interested in reconstructing a scene as it happened. A person may retain a gesture I remember and appear somewhere they have never been. Someone I associate with the heat of Brazil may emerge against Canadian snow. At times, people separated by years find themselves in the same painting. Memory transforms what it holds. Animals appear often in the work. Some belong to specific memories. Others enter the painting while I am working and remain because they change something in the image. I do not give them fixed meanings. Their presence can shift the mood of a scene or alter the relationship between the figures. At that point, the painting begins to move beyond the memory that started it. My work develops through painting and drawing. I use oil, acrylic, oil stick, pencil, and other materials depending on what a particular image requires. I often leave changes visible. A previous mark may remain beneath the paint. An area may be worked...

Artwork