It’s Not Just A Portrait

Jonni Cheatwood (EE.UU, 1986)

Jonni Cheatwood is a Brazilian-American visual artist working across many different disciplines including painting, photography, graphic design and textile art. Cheatwood’s work describes the broad visual ideas stemming from still life, abstraction and minimalism, but his approach is a wonderful amalgam of his artistic disciplines in which veritable scraps of canvas are hand-sewn together before his idiosyncratic mark-making is thereafter applied to the newly created surface. Denim, mesh, burlap sacks, t-shirts, blankets, t-shirts, screen-prints, and even his father’s worn leather satchel have all made their way into his work at one time or another. The graffiti-like scribbles, scratches and primitive colours of Cheatwood’s work is the controlled chaotic work of an erudite expressionist brought up on Saturday morning cartoons; suggesting deconstructed contour lines and bright, unforgiving primary colours often applied directly from the tube or oversize pastel. Beginning with direct marks, squiggles and doodles, Cheatwood reacts and builds up his compositions over time, working with the studio detritus that can build up as a result of working on the floor and from the physical nature of his process – allowing this to become part of his formation of the work. The many references housed in his work – whether intentional or unintentional – seem like a patchwork of Cheatwood’s own autobiography – and the works come across like humorous albeit highly personalized recollections of his life at various times.

Matthew Eguavoen (Nigeria, 1988)

Matthew Eguavoen is a rising contemporary artist from Edo State, currently living in the city of Lagos, Nigeria. He attended the University of Port Harcourt , where he attained a Bachelors in Science for Civil Engineering and Structures. In his final year at the university of Port Harcourt, Matthew decided to pursue his passion for creating art through self-study, where he continued his artistic development.

Matthew is a full-time contemporary painter, he depicts his figurative and portrait subjects using a combination of oil paint, acrylic paint, charcoal, and graphite pencils to document stories that encompass the emotions and demeanor of his muse to the viewer of his work.

Matthew uses his work to address the societal, economic, and political views across the complex intersectionality that Nigerians face in different facets of life.

His work addresses the impact of Slavery on the Africa and its people, the extinction of African traditional values and the growing sensation of religion in Africa, importation of western moral and cultural values to Africa and exiling our own cultural values as a people. Abandoning Africa for relative greener pastures in western countries.

Matthews works are featured in collections across West Africa, USA, Europe, and North America.

Amir H Fallah (Irán, 1979)

Amir H. Fallah creates paintings, sculptures, and installations that utilize personal history as an entry point to discuss race, representation, the body, and the memories of cultures and countries left behind. Through this process, the artist’s works employ nuanced and emotive narratives that evoke an inquiry about identity, the immigrant experience, and the history of portraiture.

Fallah interrogates systems of representation embedded in the history of Western art. His ornate environments combine visual vocabularies of painting and collage with elements of installation to deconstruct material modes of identity formation. Portraits of veiled subjects capitalize on ambiguity to skillfully weave fact and fiction, while questioning how to create a portrait without representing the physicality of the sitter. While the stories that surround his subjects are deeply personal and are told through the intimate possessions they hold most dear, his work addresses generational immigrant experiences of movement, trauma, and celebration. Fallah wryly incorporates Western art historical references into paintings formally rooted in the pattern-based visual language of Islamic Art. In doing so, his paintings possess a hybridity that reflects his own background as an Iranian-American immigrant straddling cultures.

Margaux Henry-Thieullent (Francia, 1988)

Margaux Henry-Thieullent, is a French visual artist. She architect, graduated from Paris Malaquais in 2019, she shows her drawing work for the first time the same year at the DDessin fair in Paris and at the Vrrraiment Festival in Toulon.

Influenced by her architectural training, her plastic practice preserves a certain approach to drawing as a physical space to be conquered within which the artist displays bizarre perspectives that seem to absorb the viewer. Margaux is inspired by the different layers that constitute contemporary culture, from characters linked to political events to our current panorama or social networks.

Iván Forcadell (Alcanar, Tarragona, 1993)

Ivan Forcadell is a multidisciplinary artist focused on painting, sculpture, installation, and recently on video art and performance. With a carefree attitude and without forced formulas, the artist intertwines narratives of his childhood in the countryside, folklore and irony.

Forcadell graduated in Design from the EINA University of Barcelona. Forcadell has numerous national and international exhibitions, among which are: “Flux Cutting”, Foco Gallery, Lisbon (2019), “The beginning of the second act”, Lluís Coromina Foundation, Barcelona (2019), “Remedios Matamoros Fibla” , We Collect, Madrid (2019), “Primavera de Escayola”, Casa de Indias Art Center, El Puerto de Santa Maria (2020) and “Un beso, una araña y una flor ( Letters to L.B.)”, Random Space, Mahón (2021). The artist’s work has been included in renowned press such as: Harper’s Bazaar, El País ICON, Vogue Spain, El Mundo or Architectural Digest Spain, among others.

Alexander James (Reino Unido, 1993)

Patching elements of James’ past, the present and the pre-empted future, his works look to reflectively tell a story about time. James’ works manifest characters and scenarios triggered from his childhood memories and stories, projecting these into present existence.

Acting as a diary for the audience, James attempts to showcase works on paper documenting these experiences or thoughts, which are later combined and expanded to create the wider narrative of his finished canvases.

Through processes of abstraction and fragmentation, James looks to create multifaceted and vibrant works interweaving elements of memories and introspections into newly constructed realities.

Lucía Tello (Sevilla, 1996)

Lucía Tello’s work focuses on aesthetic issues that come from the contemporary female stereotype and raises a reflection on gender identity from a personal perspective.

The female gender identity, linked to the consumer society and the constant global flow of images, contains its own elements of representation that are intimately linked to specific behavior patterns and objects. The systematization of the female stereotype has undergone drastic changes in recent decades due to its diffusion through the media and advertising, whose foray into everyday life has given rise to a new mode of consumption of images; something that inevitably alters our relationship with reality. Through the appropriation of these images, female clichés are catalyzed in artistic production, which are introspectively reviewed through the aesthetics of children’s toys. The artist is interested in the toy for its visual appeal and for the values ​​of femininity it contains. From these references recurring associations are drawn to female gender identity such as the ideal of beauty, the superficial and the decorative. These qualities are present and common in stereotypical advertising images that show us idealized life models, linked to the appearance and aesthetics of the domestic sphere.

As a result of the analysis of various sources, Lucía generates a discourse that lies between the search for the idealized common identity that has been imposed as a gender and the recognition of these forms as her own. She proposes a narrative that starts from experimentation and research with different materials, exploring their expressive and rhetorical possibilities. In this way, the work is situated in the simulation of the western canon as a conscious fiction to raise deep questions from the superficiality of the matter.

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