1991, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
lives and works in New York.
Stephanie Lucchese works primarily on painting and drawing, creating fictions and a personal mythology in scenes that allow a peek into an invented universe where forms, fruits, plants and figures interact in constant movement, devouring themselves as time remains still.
She works from drawings to paintings with no photographic references. The result is the theatrical artificiality of a surreal light quality, and the unnerving feeling that although everything here looks edible – from the fruits up to the people, something is off. Inspired by medieval tapestries, the drama of religious art, the logical systems of sci-fi, love songs, witchcraft history, as well as pop culture elements from the 90s and 2000s and biographical details, the artist makes paintings of velvety quality and peculiar haunting.
Nature is credible, it has its own rules. If the artist’s greatest interest still lies in fiction, it’s because fiction serves as a gateway to more real places. Mythical time, the pleasure of nostalgia, entering an ecosystem according to the logic that distinguishes it from other horizons, and finding there another garden of delights; In the progress of technique, the greatest celebration of our competence is the creation of something that distracts us. Imagination is an extension of this world into another.
As narratives emerge from one same source, we can see their outlines at a glance, in traces that extend from one scene to the next, and which we try to grasp as an ongoing process of individuation.
The taste of taste, the smell of smell, the sound of sound; reality is based on an ongoing act of perception, but there is something in the perceiver that cannot be understood. The sense of taste is an invention of the appetite. What is ephemeral tends to expand before it is subtracted by time.
The fleeting ripeness of a food; in the light of geological time, the feast of the senses is an anonymous banquet and the guests have the memory of their former kings between their teeth.
further reading, text by Leonardo Stockler
Solo Exhibition 2023, Petisco, Projeto Vênus, São Paulo, SP, Brazil, Group Exhibitions include 2021 Soft Machine, IRL, New York, NY, USA; 2019 GIFC NYC, The Hole, New York, NY, USA; SVA Summer Residency Open Studios Exhibition, New York, NY, USA; 2018 COLETIVA, Auroras, São Paulo, Brazil; 2017 EXERCÍCIO,Galeria Jaqueline Martins, São Paulo, Brazil; Collaborations include Electra, 2023, Performance by artist Regina Parra, Pinacoteca do Estado, São Paulo, Brazil; Residencies 2019 SVA Summer Residency, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY. Art Education 2015-2018 Acompanhamento de Pintura: Painting and Critical Studies with artists Regina Parra and Rodolpho Parigi, 2017-2018 Art History Post-grad, Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado (FAAP), Sao Paulo, Brazil 2015-2017 Bachelor of Fine Arts, Visual Arts, Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado (FAAP), Sao Paulo, Brazil.
@stephanielucchese