INTERVIEW WITH AN INSPIRING PAINTER BLANCA AMOROS
I like to play with this ambiguous feeling between relatability and strangeness.
Who is Blanca Amoros?
“I am a Spanish artist based in Vienna who owns a wiener dog that bites sometimes. ”
What are your goals? What inspires/motivates you?
“This is a very ambitious question. I am motivated mainly by the history of art, especially the painting made by both baroque old masters and modern painters. I strive to make a work of art that deserves to be called so, both technically and conceptually. I would like to make a painting that pays tribute to those painters and, at the same time, continues their legacy. Since I am constantly failing on this object, I must keep on trying or just quit, I find myself always between these two options.”
Your artworks tell stories of everyday people and their surroundings by merging realism with unpredictable painting decisions. However, the distortion of faces in many of your paintings allows the viewer to "try on" the body in your painting, in others words to identify with it. How those identities you paint interact with your own, Blanca's Amoros, identities?
“What I do is use found photographs of middle-calls western families as a reference and try to deconstruct the codes that are present in these types of images. Like you describe, when I paint them I do not pretend to make portraits but rather depict archetypes with whom mostly everyone in our society can relate to. These codes that conform the image (the framing, the pose, the light, the clothes, the environment, the ritual, etc.) reveal our identity and become more obvious through the abstraction of painting. I like to play with this ambiguous feeling between relatability and strangeness.”
How is the current situation influencing you? How do you deal with it?
“For me, like for a lot of people, it has been financially devastating but it was also good to focus on my work. Surprisingly, I have been enjoying a lot having nothing else to do than going to the studio. On the other hand, I had an exhibition to be open in Munich precisely on the week of the shut down, so the opening was cancelled and, even now that the exhibition has been reopened with restrictions, it seems that people that used to buy artworks are now focused on other stuff. I am also very concerned about not knowing when I will be able to teach art again. I have been enjoying it very much especially the past year in the Alte Pinakothek and the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich, and I have some workshops scheduled for September but right now there are only uncertainties.”
