Elisa Maia
Selected by DASartes art magazine, among the finalists of the Garimpo 2017 contest, the artist has a singular method of creating seductive poetry images using a mixture of artistic techniques and scientific record.
With collages, overlay images, Nanjing drawings and Watercolour paintings, Patricia rearranges collected elements from the already saturated Fauna and Flora images collection, proposing unused associations. The result is a very singular repertoire of odd beings that inhabit the borderless territory between the animal, plant organic and inorganic world. “I create specimens form a post human future. Hybrids between the animal, plant, mineral and artificial world (as disposed objects by the consumer industry).
The descriptive rigor of the drawing and the smoothness of the images remind us of botanical illustrations. Some cutouts and drawings are presented in boxes, suspended from the bottom by entomological pins, following the insect´s tradicional biological collections format. The names of the works also seem to be taken from scientific books. “smear”, “cardo physiology”, “cardo mutations”, “culture mediums”, “genes” “germination”, “host mutant” and “GM bee”. But what initially might look a description of the empiric world shows the creation of a fantastic world, permeated with fictional beings, like mutants and monstrous that seem to be from a not so far future.
“At first sight, my works suggest scientific studies, but it takes just one closer look to realize that none of it makes sense. It would be like trying to rationalize the fantastic” tells the artist. The seduction created by the beauty of the images goes along with the strangeness caused by the bizarre details of the composition. Patricia´s hybrid creatures defy biology´s taxonomic impulse that organizes the beings in qualifying drawers, showing that, the intensified hybridization processes are taking us to a place where the nominative tags are becoming obsolete.