Bruna Massadas - The Face Painter

Opening Reception: Saturday, April 7th, 6 -9 pm

Exhibition Dates: April 7th - April 28th, 2018

A particular transformation occurs when two circles, a triangle, and a curved line are positioned in a certain way. Suddenly, a sense of personhood is found: an individual with distinctive physical features, facial expression and a unique personal history is realized from the background of the painting. When does a line transcend form and become a mouth? When does a mouth become a smile or a pout? How are we able to glean so much from so little?

The painting practice of Brazilian born and Bay Area-based artist Bruna Massadas is concerned with these very questions. The artist crafts endearingly awkward portraits of women candidly portrayed in a variety of emotional and psychological states, or engrossed within a telephone call’s gritty details. The Face Painter as an exhibition title is both an honest description of the artist’s practice, as well as an allusion to her first job as a face painter at T.G.I. Friday’s, and the interesting form of intimate connection this provided with restaurant patrons. Face painting for Massadas presented a form through which the artist and subject were able to transcend their own vulnerabilities and communicate on a deeper level–an effect that is not dissimilar to the connection that occurs while looking at the artist’s work. Massadas’ paintings are as much portraits of people as they are of interior worlds, which unfold generously before the viewer and present the opportunity for empathy. The ample emotional content described in these paintings is paired with a materially intensive approach to painting and drawing, oftentimes with entire works composed via the deeply saturated scumbles of oil pastels, or an intense gradient of acrylic paint broken up by simple outlines and shadows comprising the face and forms of a subject. A visit to the artist’s studio reveals a growing cast of characters gracing the walls of the artist’s studio, each figure peering from their frame yet still consumed by their interior world–all in effect helping to make painting not such a lonely act.