Latin America through the line of Luiz Escañuela

Born in São Caetano do Sul, Luiz has been training his eye with observation drawings since childhood - through artistic techniques and dynamics. With his studies in visual and contemporary arts, he works on skin texture as part of his personal signature; exploring the nuances of the human body to create representations that converge with Brazilian visual symbols.

We talked a bit with Luiz about his creative process and, above all, the technique behind his works. Check it out below:

We know you have been training your drawings since you were 6 years old. Was this something always encouraged by your family?

A: Yes, it was. At first, it wasn’t a “training,” I just liked to “play drawing” with my sister and friends. At that time, I made some drawings and sold them for 10 cents to buy candy during recess, by the way. But my parents, whenever they could, would buy new materials, colored pencils, papers, paints. That’s why I never stopped familiarizing myself and having fun with drawing.

At 15, I discovered a technical course in graphic design. A friend who was taking the course would come to my house with drawings made in numerous techniques: graphite, colored pencil, gouache, ink. That’s when I understood that drawing could be taken to a more “tangible” profession. Since then, I dove more deeply into the techniques, both as a graphic designer and, later, as a visual artist.

Which artists or movements influence your work in constructing your narratives?
A: This answer tends to change depending on the phase of my painting and what I want to come along with it. Sometimes I answer by citing artists whose works are completely different from mine, but who, in some way, inspire me by the way they see the world and their art.

Recently, I have been interested in studying artists who share a body-oriented approach and their pictorial possibilities. So, I would answer Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and Jenny Saville. In all three, the materiality of painting becomes an essential means to convey the psychological and emotional intensity of the body. It is dissected, turned inside out, worked as a mass, transformed into landscape, into feeling, into things. I am very interested in the procedure of conceiving a body that is both tangible and intangible at the same time.

I have also been spending a lot of time observing the work of Luis Caballero Holguín, a Colombian artist from the second half of the 20th century, especially his drawings. He brings graphic movements to anatomy, especially when working with more than one body, selecting areas of interest and merging the figures in a way that has been quite intriguing to me.

How does your personal experience and perception of South America influence the thematic choice of your work?

A: There have been moments when I believed that the literalness of the elements inserted into the painting would lead me to some “fidelity of origin.” But as I matured my work, I began to feel that this southern or Latin identity would be attached to my painting in one way or another. I feel that the analogies I make with the materiality of the body “ground” me here, pulling me back in an intrinsic way to my way of painting and seeing the body. So, it’s not an intentional procedure. My perspective on the South integrates my work through other layers, I believe that today, they are less literal and more instinctive than when I started painting.

What is your creative process like before starting a series?

A: My work has a strong connection with photography, so I spend many hours of my creative process doing image editing: selecting, cutting, inverting. Many of these photographs are the basis for charcoal sketches, where I begin to experiment with lines and shapes. Photography, cinema, and even literature give me insights into the body and its possibilities. But I try not to limit myself to body photography, so I also spend a lot of time collecting historical images from Braziliana Iconográfica or taking screenshots of documentaries about nature and landscape.

After the sketches, I do some color tests and begin to open the palette as the painting takes shape. Previously, I painted with the canvas divided by grids, which gave me an absurd control over the detailing. Today, I no longer use the grid because, in a way, I have memorized the behavior of skin flows and those finer details. This brings spontaneity and freedom to this new approach to anatomy that has emerged in my work.

Recently, I have been experimenting with new materials that enhance painting and bring more textures. I have been using dry tips, gouges, and sandpaper to “scrape” and hit the canvas. I’m no longer interested in simply covering everything with paint like a cinematic film. When painting the body, I feel that the painting needs more matter to pulse like a living being and reach the viewer in a less literal way.

Do you believe that art can be a form of resistance?

A: The shortest and most obvious answer to this question would be: “Yes, just the fact of making art is a type of resistance,” but I will use this space to try to go a little further.

Art can be resistance, but it is important to be aware of some variables. Against what is one trying to resist? What kind of resistance will this be?

Those who propose to address deep themes regarding the social fabric need to be responsible. Artists are not excluded from this. After the rise of neofascism became clear, a wave of “we will be resistance” emerged, and I have always been a bit suspicious about the meaning of art that wants (very much) to “resist.”

The problem arises when “resistance art” becomes a type of currency, a utilitarian discourse that is not concerned with the content or textual character of that resistance, thought of only with the aim of institutional gain or the money that can be made by selling “resistance works” to a progressive middle class that has stopped collecting Funko and shopping decorations and started investing in art. That’s when the critique loses strength, and we create scenarios where it hardly matters whether that resistance truly resists something or if there is some embryo of disruption in that work or discourse.

So it’s important to be aware if SOME “resistance arts” have already been co-opted, enticed, and domesticated by the very entity against which they initially aimed to resist. It can be thorny, but if we don’t talk about it, the importance of these themes can be neutralized, because we already know that capital has systematic ways of devouring the urgency of important issues for the dignity and the future of humanity. And this is NOT different in the arts.

There are artists who know this. They have acquired a certain cunning to ironize and expose some of the contradictions of this “resistance” and know how to ride certain hypes only to later give voice to what few have the courage to say. That inspires me and makes me hopeful.

For me, one of the ways to resist as an artist is to remain faithful to what is most intimate: your most extreme concerns, your greatest enchantments or despairs. It’s having an attentive ear to what the world might be asking (forcing) you to do, and responding: “no, I am not obliged to address this.” The artist resists when they do what they, and only they can do; you feel a silent truth that refuses to bow down. Usually, that doesn’t sound repetitive, it doesn’t seem like a pastiche or a recipe.

Pasteurized, domesticated resistance is not resistance at all. It’s a decorative aesthetic that alleviates guilt that shouldn’t be alleviated.

How do you see the interaction between the materiality of the body and the historical wounds of the South American continent in your work?

A: The answer goes along the same lines as the answer given above about my personal experience and perception of South America: my construction as a citizen-artist-subject on this continent has made me curious and sensitive to certain subjects and research. Gradually, this led me to the paths of the body and, somehow, to its wounds and pains. I will never forget the first time I read the title “The Open Veins of Latin America,” by Eduardo Galeano. Although today it's almost a cliché, I remember the discomfort and enchantment at this association between body and geography. That created countless images that have never left my mind.

As I began to understand a way to paint the body associated with the landscape, distanced from its functional literalness, those pains began to appear, sometimes as literal wounds, other times as a more aggressive way of painting the skin, with more contrasts and weight in the textures.

How do you see the duality between beauty and violence present in South America, and how does this duality reflect in your art?

A: It is difficult to answer this without mentioning Gabriel García Márquez and magical realism. I have been reading his work since adolescence, so I cannot think of this duality without remembering such a magical yet raw approach to reality. I imagine that dealing with the body with its beauty, appetites, pains, and fears has to do with this notion of a world where extraordinary phenomena and moments of astonishment appear side by side with brutality, as if both were equally natural, even knowing that they are not. I feel that a certain “fantastic beauty” does not dilute suffering; on the contrary, it intensifies it, making the complexity of the region even more palpable.

For you, what would be the role of art in raising awareness about environmental issues? Do you see art as a catalyst for change?

A: The exact role I don’t know. What I do know is that art brings people closer together; it has that power to invite us to approach complex themes. The issue of climate is intrinsically linked to the economic structures that govern the contemporary world. The more art highlights the contradictions of these structures, the more it can position itself as an ally of a future project.

How does your work seek to break with the anthropocentric and selfish view of art, by balancing human representation with a critique of human actions in the context of environmental devastation?

A: There are many artistic approaches to the body. One of the maneuvers I try to make is to bring, through painting, the material of the body to what is external to it: earth, deserts, veins, river arteries. In that sense, I think there is a kind of “finger on the wound” in making the transposition of the matter that makes us experience the world (our body) placed in the place of what can be called the “environment,” experiencing its pains, its wounds, its agonies. It’s a mental exercise. And it doesn’t always have to be in the sense of pain and suffering; sometimes, the body in my painting is conceived to be hybrid, confused with mud and water in a more ethereal and synesthetic sense, thinking about a deep time and the symbiosis of the body with the world.

In a context of constant social and environmental transformation, how do you see the importance of preserving memories of ancestry and geography while connecting the body with history?

A: In a social sense, I really like to think that looking at the body is also looking at History. I always imagine that the yearnings, needs, discomforts, sounds, textures, etc., of my body are/were shared to a greater or lesser degree with the bodies of others, whether they are alive or not. Along this line of thought, it is possible to do some exercises of approximation with any historical figure or time. I don’t know if it’s just a breeze of mine, but it makes me more interested in this sense of communion we can have, even if it is not literal. I get irritated by this eternal need for a “network of connection,” extremely literal connections, observed, computed, exalted, sold, etc. We end up not observing some connections that are much more veiled, which encompass the experience of our bodies in both a cultural and physiological sense. I believe that art can delve into the labyrinth of anatomical, geographical, and historical bodies and deepen these questions in an extremely powerful way.

The body is not “inserted” in History as a mere sidekick to the mind; they shape it together. They are inseparable.

In relation to the future — are there any plans or projects you would like to develop and already have in mind?

A: In the short term, I would like to do some residency abroad, immerse myself in another place, understand how art works in different contexts. In the long term, I would love to have a larger studio, a more communal space for technical experimentation and active idea exchange. We’ll see. :)