The fantastic realism of Ana Elisa Egreja

Since early on, the artist has always been in contact with art and it was in her childhood that she realized through painting ways to express herself - where memories and imagination meet. Mastering realism since childhood, Ana explores various themes that transcend the everyday, promoting reflections beyond the usual. It was by uniting all her baggage that she established her style, with a striking visual that flirts with magical realism, playing with fictional worlds and bringing a sense of belonging and nostalgia.

We talked to her about her life, creative processes, and elements that stand out in her works like soap dishes, tiles, and fluted glasses and how they transform into tools capable of telling stories. Check it out below:

• From a very young age, you already knew you wanted to work with art. But what place did painting, specifically, hold in your interests?

Since I was little, I have always liked art. I remember all the birthday and Christmas presents from my childhood. I always asked for colored pencils - someone traveled and I asked for Prismacolor, a colored pencil that wasn’t sold here in Brazil in the 80s. 

When I was about 16, I started working as an assistant in Marina Saleme's studio, a friend of my mother's. So even while in high school, I was in direct contact with paints, with an active studio. This made me decide that when the time came to apply to college, I would pursue fine arts. After three years of working with her, I entered visual arts and there I developed and fell in love with painting.

• At what moment in your life did you find yourself, shall we say, “defined,” by this style of painting that is now characteristic of you?

I remember that moment very well, and it was after my graduation. I was in art school in the early 2000s, and at that time, painting had much less knowledge, appeal, and visibility than it does today. The artists who were successful at that time were performing or doing photography. And painting was, in a way, forgotten, to the point that some of the professors who were great painters and artists from the '80s said they continued painting but that the trend had changed. My interest in painting was manifested there, reading and learning art history, alongside these artist professors - Paulo Pasta in the center - and some other friends who later became the "Grupo 2000e8."

Regarding technique, initially, I painted in a much more gestural way than I do today, perhaps influenced by Marina, with whom I worked, and by Paulo, who was my teacher and mentor, both abstract, as well as by the American abstract expressionist artists that I love so much. 

But I found myself in a dilemma because I had a realistic drawing style, since childhood. I knew, I can draw everything I want… I drew people, the houses I lived in. Always a very careful and virtuous drawing. And in painting, almost abstract, because of those influences.

Therefore, it was only when I left college and stayed at home, free from the “problems and trends of academia,” that I managed to combine my drawing with my painting. And there, in the old toy room of my parents' house, an atelier began to form, and the painting philosophy I still hold today, with realistic paintings created through virtual collages, blending erudite and popular elements with equal importance, fabrics and paints everywhere! 

• Who are your main influences, and how do they inspire you to create?

I have already mentioned a bit about the influence of the internet which was radical for those who lived it, you know? I entered college and there was no internet. And I left college with a cellphone and internet. So, I lived this transformation of starting to research works of art in books, in the analog world, and finishing in digital space. Because of this profusion of images available online, almost everyone worked with figurative painting. In my case, I would search for things on the web to compile my work folders, and with them, I created the paintings. I sought curtains from websites around the world and collected these curtains, as well as rugs and tiles. Since my graduation, I had a great interest in the genre of Interior and Still Life painting, both developed in the Netherlands in the 17th century. I really identified with the domestic theme and the virtuosity in painting, and it remains my central theme to this day.

• During the pandemic, you could have painted on various scenarios. Why paint soap dishes, with the highlighted tiles in the background?

I think I need to go back a bit… In 2016, I started becoming very demanding with representation in painting  - I wanted to paint a pineapple on a mirrored table, and I couldn't find that image on the internet. I needed to go to the market to buy a pineapple, buy a mirrored table, and bring it home. Then I wanted to paint a chick in a sink: it's impossible! So I rented chicks. That's how I started needing to stage and use cinematic procedures, like renting animals, producing sets, flooding, production of objects… Staging to then paint. 

Many modernist artists did this. I resumed a creative process from Matisse, for instance, staging with fabrics and odalisques in the early 20th century. 

In 2020, with the pandemic, it became impossible to go out, to 25 de março looking for trinkets, renting houses or animals, so I started working with my own archive. The tiles that were in the folders I mentioned collecting for over 15 years… I began working with them as a formal exercise. 

When I made the first painting of a soap dish and posted it, in the middle of that pandemic chaos, I didn't know that the soap dishes would become an affective device, have so much identification and reach a collective unconscious… I was surprised and after painting many and not seeing any prospects of exhibiting them due to the pandemic's progression, I launched the book “Soap Dishes.”

In my paintings, you can recognize a place that does not exist - and recognizable situations that do not exist are closely linked to my research on Fantastic Realism. Sometimes I can condense in a small painting the power of the large ones… That's the case with the soap dishes, the glasses, and the plates.

The real scale, the true greatness of things, is very important to me. So, large paintings are large because things are the real size of the room, 1 to 1. The same applies to smaller formats.

• In many of your works, there is the use of stained glass. Is there any specific memory or reason for including them in the paintings?

I love painting glass! There is a certain subversion of technique. Painting with oil paint, which is the most material, a transparent, translucent surface.

I painted fluted and hammered glasses for the first time in 2013. They are part of Brazilian architecture, and they have the beautiful name “fantasy glass.” And I have always connected with them in service areas and bathrooms of old houses... And when I painted the first one, I found the pixelation of the image to be very interesting, which can reach abstraction and this technical issue: the oil paint is the most fleshy paint, full of volume - I love that volume and the infinite possibilities it offers in the so-called “kitchen of painting,” and the challenge it is to paint glass with it. 

• You are a portraitist of everyday reality, but your scenarios are, in a way, invented. How do you balance this duality?

I love to think that painting is never a real fact, painting is always a pictorial fact, but because it is painted realistically, many people interpret that the place is real, that I visited that place to paint that way. And I love this confusion; I identify with Fantastic Realism, the movement of Latin American literature, which, just as I do in painting,  uses linguistic resources that confuse time, space, with metaphors and geographical and temporal confusion, and we always wonder whether that existed or not. Improbable situations, but not impossible.

• What are your aspirations for the future? Do you have a project or something specific you want to accomplish?

I want to exhibit a series that I have been producing for two  years - paintings that speak of the passage of life and the symbols that each color has during this passage... I am working hard on this project, and I hope to have an exhibition with them soon!