Sunrise (2025) Painting by Valeria Yscava

Art is centered on one fundamental, basic plot, one figure – a person. As an artist, I focus my optics on the nature of personality in its relationships with others, in interaction with the network of cultural traditions and codes. In this limitless field of research, I problematize the figure of a person as a medium, offering viewers to critically consider our ability to hear and understand each other, to be sincere.

I work with people's stories, using allegories, wordplay, the form of a symbolic and pictorial palimpsest. History is accumulated by a person, turning into a unique symbolic aura, like a tree rhizome. It is this model that seems to me the most interesting context for working with a portrait image. Constructing characters according to this model, I create and, at the same time, strive to unravel the appearance of a person as a rebus – as a restrained and unpredictably distorted exteriority of his inner world, his feelings, views and experience, his personal history. As an exquisite dance of reality and fiction, a wild fantasy that serves either the creative or escapist principle in a person. 

As an artist, I only bring the characters to light, trying to let them express themselves and tell about themselves. For me, as well as for the viewer, the person depicted in the portrait always remains a mystery. 

However, despite the fact that people are not endowed with the ability to read each other's thoughts, our desire to be sincere is not hopeless. There is always an opportunity to approach the Other - through participation in the collective, in the archetypal. This is only a whisper, but its echo can be heard and recognized in the Other. This is the balance between knowledge and complete ignorance: to be sincere, but never have the opportunity to be completely visible; to doubt, but inevitably to be involved. 

For me, a portrait is a kind of field of conceptualization of a vacuum as an imaginary quality that we, by inertia, attribute to the endless network of intertext. There is no void as such between people, everything is interconnected. I strive to project this diachrony of illusion and reality onto a familiar, empathically close image of a person. 

In the end, a person, a portrait, a private worldview never remain isolated from the attention of the Other. We live a t historical experience, an experience of sharing the sensory. I paint portraits of the Other, likening them to still frames, which at first glance may seem meaningless, empty. But in fact, each such still frame is a part, a link in a modern history familiar to everyone and lived by everyone.

• Nationality: BRAZIL
• Date of birth : 1993
• Artistic domains:
• Groups: Contemporary Brazilian Artists