Luisanna Gonzalez Quattrini paints visions of a timeless world that speak honestly about the world today. Beneath her shimmering, bright colours lie truths that conceal disconcerting oddness. She seems to cultivate a child’s gaze, laying bare everything that adults repress. In her paintings, innocence vies with nostalgia, reasons seem dictated by bodies, and instincts dominate urbanity. In her subjects and in the very materiality of her work, fluids control masses.

She develops her subjects in small paintings which she uses like notebooks. Some are then taken up and reworked in larger compositions. One of her preferred subjects is the overspill of consciousness. The recurrent presence of animals in her paintings reflects a pre-civilisational attachment to the environment. Her characters also express their own animality and find themselves in relationships outside normal social bonds. The omnipresence of water invites the visitor to drift towards subconscious imagery associated with it, evoking both the source of all life and mortal peril.

Her work hovers ambivalently between mountains of thick impasto and liquid expanses, allowing both symbolic readings that reveal a relationship with the physical realm that is utterly without taboo, and a deep-rooted conception of the fundamentals of painting.

Luisanna Gonzalez Quattrini was born in 1972 in Lima. She studied at the Haute Ecole d’Art et Design, Geneva, and lives and works in Basel.

The exhibition was made possible thanks to the support of the Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation, the Ernst Göhner Stiftung and the Fondation Bonhôte pour l’art contemporain. The exhibition catalogue was published thenks to the  the support of CCAP (Caisse cantonale d’assurance professionnelle).