Paula Rosa

Bio

Paula Rosa is a designer and visual artist living and working in Lisbon. She showed an early interest for the Visual Arts, from painting to film animation, Photography and Design, which proceeded naturally in her academic training. In 2008, she graduated from University Lusófona in Equipment and Space Design and in 1998 from Jean Piaget Institute in Design and Production's Management of Pedagogical Media, completed with internship at Halmstad University, Sweden.

In 2003, conscious about the importance of new technologies and how they have been revolutionizing the arts, she began to experiment drawing and painting in the computer. Since then, Paula Rosa has been completely emerged in the digital environment, being the computer her tool of election to express her creativity. She has also organized art related workshops and lectures and has written essays on the emerging New Media Art.

Since 2009, she has been designing CD covers for international rock bands, book covers and illustrations for Portuguese writers and creating film animations for relevant exhibitions in the scope of Science and History.

Paula Rosa has held several solo exhibitions, in Portugal and in the U.S.A. and participated in group exhibitions throughout Europe. Her work has been awarded and is represented in private collections, museums and institutions in Portugal and abroad.

She divides her activity by an art made of brushes and the discipline of Design; a dualistic option that marks her work and its route.

Statement

Through my painting, I like to tell timeless stories, in which action develops in different and often absurd tenses. It may appear as a chaotic stop-motion sequence, in which frames range from the ancestral concerns to the cataclysm of modern societies, on what seems to be the verge of a self-induced apocalypse. The future, as in any unfinished story, is a prominent question mark, being the difference between dystopic and utopic impressions, sometimes, just a matter of perspective.

As each perspective is equally important, and no rarely I‘ve found myself learning from others through my own work, whenever talking about it, I prefer to restrict myself to the most obvious, keeping a comfortable distance from the work, to avoid any interference on the viewer's perception. I believe things shall remain as open as possible and I also believe that no authors should convince themselves that their art is condemned to depletion inside their personal boundaries. It rather expands and transcends the limits of the artist, invades each viewer's personal sphere, becoming richer and richer. This is, in fact, what makes Art so passionate.

I‘ve always been fascinated by the human mind, and consequently by the broad and diverse fields of Philosophy and Psychology, which inevitably reflects in my work. Humans belong to a strange species, owner of an inquisitive mind and able to convert whatever information into a myriad of forms to serve infinitely diverse ends. We certainly live in a complex and exhausting condition and that's possibly the price we have to pay for inhabiting a world in which systems maintain a fascinating and somehow mysterious dialogue.

I‘m as interested in the questions we raise as in the answers we can get. Both seem to be essential lines, intersecting in spacetime, to compose the portrait of Humanity. Down my dead road to understand its nature, I‘ve felt an impulse to cristallize each interesting fragment of the landscape and then dare to call it “a concept“. Once I grasp whatever tools suit my intention, the concept assumes a form, in a physical or virtual support, and can then be communicated in some sort of universal language.

“Lables”, styles or “isms” attributed to my work really don't matter to me and I've always despised them. That's another world of our Universe, populated by critics and art technicians. What interests me is the concept, the knowledge I get in the process and the ability to communicate it all visually. I don‘t paint styles, I paint myself.