Mónica Mindelis Brazil, b. 1978

Mónica Mindelis lives and works in Lisbon. In her artistic practice, drawing emerges as a malleable territory, its boundaries expanding and contracting through a multidisciplinary approach to pictorial matter.

Her use of oil bars on paper — a technique she favours for the sense of proximity it establishes between the hand and the surface — allows her to explore the relationship between gesture and material, leaving traces that bear witness to this physical closeness, such as the imprint of the hand, the texture of the skin or the intensity of applied pressure. Other materials, including raffia and plaster, also feature within this space of aesthetic, material and sensory exchange, at times evoking a personal and affective connection to ancestry and the symbolic religious traditions of Afro-Brazilian culture.

In the early stages of her practice, the use of these materials was associated with the creation of specific series within her body of work, functioning as autonomous systems within her artistic universe. Today, they are increasingly integrated into her pictorial language and the exploration of the boundaries of drawing that characterises her practice.

More recently, her work has expanded into three-dimensionality, reflecting the diversity of scales that has always characterised her production. This expansion is expressed both through the construction of objects that remain, at the same time, within the realm of drawing — such as plaster engravings — and through an essentially tactile approach to painting.

Structured in series, Mónica Mindelis’s work is often driven by literary and philosophical research, giving rise to explorations that bring together seemingly contrasting dimensions of human experience. Her practice thus examines relationships of tension and complementarity between conceptual pairs such as body and spirit, step and flight, earth and sky, weight and lightness.