We sit down with Mexico-city based artist Juana Subercaseaux for our Atelier Unraveled: Q+A to discuss her art practice. Born and raised in Chile, Subercaseaux comes from a lineage of artists and was introduced to oil painting as a child. Naturally influenced by the stunning and unpredictable natural landscape around her, Subercaseaux's paintings intertwine a biomorphic, spiritual, and feminine element where your eyes become lost in a cosmic landscape. Rich bursts of color, natural phenomena, and abstract forms fill the canvas leading viewers into an escapism and into their own imaginations.
Juana, when and how did you get into painting?
JS — I have been painting since I was very young. My older sister is also a painter, and she taught me how to use oil paintings when I was a kid, at 7 or 8 years old. We used to go outside and while she worked at the easel, I had to choose big flat stones and use them as a canvas. Some time later, my dad bought me a small set of oil paints, with the wood suitcase and everything. I really liked the intensity of oil colors, it made me want to eat it (I actually tried it) and also used turpentine, linseed oil... They felt like really grown-up stuff, like making potions, and there was an attraction to these experiments, with its messiness and effects. One day, I had a very simple thought, but really struck me: I can make the image I want, any image. All the possibilities are available. We will never run out of images, it's up to me how far I can go. This idea encouraged me and became an initiative.
Also in my family there are many painters, both current and in past generations. So it's something I've always lived with; going to exhibitions, having paintings on the walls at home, talking about painting at dinner, etc. It always came very naturally and I wouldn't have thought of studying anything else.
I first came across your work online and was taken away by how stunning and fluid your paintings are. Your work is very distinct, walk us through how you start and finish a painting?
JS — I have in my computer a large collection of folders with images from different origins, such as photos taken by me, internet images, details of paintings, references, gifs, etc. All sorted by a random personal criteria. A selection from this groups of images plus imagination exercises, act as a starting point that can be modified many times in the process.
I’m interested in exploring the idea of an experiential painting rather than a careful methodology. Sometimes the starting point are quite poetic, other times I simply imagine how to represent, for example, a mutating cell, something melting, or a sound. Lately I have been playing with the idea of painting just actions, which are “alive” in themselves. Verbs like pile up, grow, transform, fade, lift, wrap, squeeze, etc, act as a reference for the kind of movement I intend to transmit, without an entity that performs the action. I also use Photoshop to create an image a priori, but always remain open to change. Sometimes the path is clearer, more like collaging and coloring, and other times it is a struggle for me to make things come together.
When I view your work, I see so many natural and cosmic elements. What is the parallel to your work, nature, and the universe?
JS — My work is related to ideas coming from Animist and Buddhist philosophies, whose natural elements are intimately related to perception or acquire phenomenological qualities, placing them in a spectrum of references related to spirituality, fantasy, dreams, hallucinations, evocation, intimacy and mysticism.
“Divinity is our capacity to relate to the cosmos,” I heard once in a Buddhism Nowadays seminar. I don't remember who said it (excuse the vagueness) but I found it very accurate. Personally, my work and a “spiritual awareness” (the term itself isn’t very satisfying) have been developing retroactively, in which the spiritual practice raises questions that I seek to answer through painting, and the pictorial exercise asks for mental explorations, in order to open up new ideas of representation.
I believe that both aspects express themselves in a very similar way. Both painting and spirituality are self-evident and self-sufficient experiences, and this link has captured my interest. I mean by “self-evident” and “self-sufficient” in the sense that both are as they are; they exist only in a present instant and manifest their full nature in one’s own experience, in a clear and free introspection. This a is very intimate matter and that is something I’m interested in representing, so the search for a spiritual or invisible link with nature/cosmos has been a consequence of the artistic practice. By this, I mean that just in the experience of painting, I began to understand small keys to explore something deeper, which led to an intellectual, poetic and spiritual curiosity that feeds my work.
You were born in Chile and now live in Mexico, how have both places influenced your work?
JS — I was born in Chile and have lived almost all my life there, and it has certainly influenced my work. I feel that living in Chile, it's a bit inevitable not to feel the latency of the nature that surrounds you, even in the big cities. On one side there is the Andes Mountains and on the other the Pacific Ocean, which at that latitude is powerful. This gives a feeling of insularity and isolation, and if you want, is easy to be alone in nature. Also there is an intense, tragic relationship with nature. We have lived through strong earthquakes, tsunamis, landslides, and fires. Arid deserts, mountains, forests and icebergs also exist in this same country. I believe these aspects generate an active and intimate bond with nature, wonderful, melancholic and threatening at the same time, and for sure these experiences have had an impact on my work.
As for Mexico, to get into the art market and the cultural panorama was a great motivation to move here, besides I have always liked Mexico very much. Culturally it is polymorphic, having an huge diversity of traditions and cosmogonies. Although I feel quite ignorant on this matter, it is evident that the artistic expressions and festivities are diverse, they are forms of spiritual connections and each one has a specific territorial narrative, so each visual language is very different from another. It would be too much to say now that it has influenced my work, but it is a wonderful thing to learn. It makes you ask yourself about this classic dilemma between art and craft. You see pieces by artisans that are really magnificent, but there is no authorship. They have collective purposes, not individual ones and this is moving for me to see it that way.
What are three words you would use to describe your work?
JS — Oh, that’s hard. I think initimate, cosmos, feminine.
How has your work evolved from the first painting you created to your most recent? It’s so effortless and easy for viewers to get lost in your work with your use of mesmerizing colors and fantastical movements. I see a gradual progression from when you first started using a certain color palette to incorporating more colors into your more recent work.
JS — I started painting landscapes. They were not specific places, but I intended to represent fictitious places that had a certain sense of mystery, reverie or lethargy. Although I did’t think about it as “landscape painting,” there was a horizon line, so that was immediately understood as a place.
At some point I began to look closer, the horizon line disappeared and I painted natural elements from a macro point of view. My painting has been detaching from representing an eloquent and identifiable nature, and has evolved to “organicities.” Beneath all these classifications, I believe that painting, whether you want it or not, reveals a world, and there were periods when I couldn't access so easily to the freedom and openness that a good painting requires, that “effortless” effect you mention. Honestly, I was also a bit depressed! And that just creeps into the atmosphere you express.
I think you have to train that openness like a muscle, and in that sense Buddhist meditation has been a great tool for me. Of course there is a self-confidence and technical aspects that gain strength with practice, and you can set challenges for yourself that in the past you didn’t dare to do or weren’t in your field of ideas, but you can get there only by exploration and practice. That openness is for me the most profound challenge. The “effortless” is an aspect that always have been highly valued in painting, but it has to be real, you can't fake it and somehow that is perceived. You see how many painters throughout history evolve from figurative painting to abstraction, and not the other way around. The challenge of expressing a world through forms, linked to perception more than concepts stimulates me, and that interrelation of subjectivities is very important in my work. But for that you can't skip the process, the search is endless.
What would you say to your younger self about art or the art lessons you have learned?
JS — I remember in preschool you had to dress up as what you wanted to be when you grew up and I went as a painter (sadly more like a male painter, I wore a mustache). So I think my younger self would get a big high five. For a while I went to hypnosis therapy, and in one session you had to meet yourself, at whatever age popped up in the moment. And that’s what I did, a high five with my baby self, it was great.
In terms of lessons, I think the most important thing is discipline, but not the kind of discipline with that flavor that the word has, about sacrifice and displeasure; but a joyful discipline, of action, of getting things done and feel the retribution. Despite whatever narrative you may tell yourself, insecurity, procrastination, nonsense, laziness, etc, the biggest challenge is just to get to your workplace daily and DO things. If the curiosity and interest is real, everything else will fall into place.
Art outlives the creator. What is the legacy you would like to be remembered by?
JS — Ideally in many, many years, that everything biodegrades haha. For now, I feel proud just to join the Latin American women painters team, that’s good enough.
Whether I choose it or not, there is something very feminine in my painting and I think it has to do with the commitment that implies painting from an intimate place. And when the task is that personal and solitaire, essential aspects of yourself will appear and it’s kind of inevitable. For me, that has a great value, and if it resonates or touches someone else, that's more than enough.
Images courtesy of the artist.