Alice Quaresma

Photography is a departure point of Alice Quaresma’s practice. Taking photographs of natural landscapes from her personal archive, the artist reworks them by adding lines, shapes and colours to infuse these images with new meanings. By making collages of digital and analogue photographs of beach, forest and city landscapes, and letting materials like acrylic paint, gouache, oil pastel, pencil and tape take the foreground to create unique works of art, Quaresma explores the physicality of the medium of photography and ways in which imagination and reality overlap and collide. Her artworks are a celebration of syncretism, harmoniously fusing photo documentary and abstract art references with distinguishable modes of making.

Being fascinated by the essence of photography, Quaresma explores its objectivity, questioning what images are and how they relate to reality. She links the past, seen in the photos and the present. The past elements are presented by the photographs taken by the artist to register her journey a long time ago without having an idea to turn them into the artworks in mind. The notion of the present is implemented by alien elements which are added to conventional postcard-style landscape images: her expressive brushstrokes obscure parts of the composition, and geometrical elements frame or crop them, questioning the documentary function of photography and its neutrality.