Through vivid pictorial compositions, Luísa Matsushita's painting follows a path towards the minimal and elemental. With precise color work, she explores the relationships present at the boundaries between tonal layers, capable of imparting individuality to each of her works. In her practice, painting becomes realized as it presents itself to the world as an autonomous entity, almost personified, and imbued with a sense of humor.
Read MoreConsistently focused on fragments of everyday reality, her gaze seeks to stretch the visibility of trivial elements. For Matsushita, painting reveals itself as an act of urgency and courage, resulting from the impulse to create something intimate, everyday, and protected. Thus, through gestural movements, her archipelago of compositions can also refer to the portrayal of a dwelling, imagining ways to imaginatively inhabit the property of each color.
With a multidisciplinary and self-taught trajectory, Luísa Matsushita is a visual artist and musician. She has been developing her pictorial practice since 2013 and currently lives and works in São Paulo. She is a founding member of the feminist band Cansei de Ser Sexy, which revolutionized the national indie pop scene in the early 2000s. In her musical work, she collaborated with names like Bobby Gillespie (Primal Scream), David Sitek (TV on the Radio), Kavinsky, among others.
After more than a decade of touring worldwide, she dedicated herself, starting in 2014, to the study and practice of bioconstruction, permaculture, and Earthship Biotecture, deepening her knowledge of agroecology through a series of experiences in the United States and Latin America. Her learning from nature allowed Matsushita to develop her own ecological home — a sustainable shack — in 2018. Turning it into a life project, the artist connected all her research in one place, spatializing her painting on walls, gates, and interior furniture.
Among her recent solo exhibitions are: If it's not for crying, I don't even leave the house, Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo, Brazil (2023); ELA, Galerie L'Amazonie, Manaus, AM (2015); and Animal, Percy Gallery, Oakland, USA (2014). In 2015, she participated in painting workshops with Rodolpho Parigi and Regina Parra and, in the same year, joined the Igarapé do Mariano artist residency (Galerie L’Amazonie, Manaus, AM), where she deepened her research on the environment.
Text courtesy Luisa Strina.
