JUNE CANEDO DE SOUZA
Artist Statement
I approach color, line, and composition as interdependent, gestural forces that situate surface within the liminal space of perception and form. The canvas is not a frame but a responsive, almost-body: folded, punctured, rolled, and recontextualized as it migrates from floor to table to wall, beginning over and again. How, then, does the surface bear the weight of its own becoming?
Though oil currently anchors my practice, I integrate acrylic paint, oil pastels, charcoal, wild clay, and found materials like cheesecloth and aluminum cake pans. These elements often appear partially obscured, acting as disruptors, destroyers, or temporary support structures. The painting extends itself through duration; materials accumulate, disintegrate, and shift in relation to their surroundings.
In Dessert Table, a large-scale work developed through multiple iterations, abstracted floral motifs recall the domestic textiles of my childhood, of a time when birthday celebrations were not shaped by the influence of American media. I am interested in the spatialities of lived experience, the regional specificities of looking and seeing, the embodied gestures that are quietly inherited, and the aesthetic rituals of self-making. It is within this context that I speak of my mother, and through her and the women before her, I speak of painting. In their adaptation is where I learned to look.