Description
ARTIST STATEMENT
In Diamond Forde’s poem, the body refuses shame. It enters the street as something tidal, grinding, sweating, radiant in its excess. Joy becomes a form of disobedience. The body learns itself through motion, through contact, through its refusal to be reduced.
My paintings emerge from this same refusal. I paint to interrupt the distance I was taught to keep from my own flesh. In the studio, bodies collapse into one another, their edges loosening, as if gravity itself had softened. They lean, fold, reveal themselves, and press together. They form temporary shelters, structures built from weight and trust. No single figure holds. They exist through each other.
This process of making allows me to reclaim authority over how I inhabit my body. As I paint, the body exceeds the image I thought I knew. It becomes landscape, animal, open wound, refuge. It expands beyond coherence, beyond discipline. It begins to belong to itself again, moving beyond the edges of the canvas.
Like Forde’s dancer, who moves “to praise the ocean,” these figures do not perform for permission. They generate their own rhythm. They insist on pleasure as knowledge. On presence as power.
Painting becomes a way of returning to myself — not as something fixed, but as something unstable, porous, and alive. The body, here, is not an object to be resolved. It is a process of transformation. A force that gathers, spills, and remakes its own form.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Julieta Beltrán Lazo (b. 1997, Mexico City) is a visual artist and educator whose work unfolds between Guadalajara and Chicago. Her practice moves across painting, fiber, performance, and writing to investigate the body as a site of memory, transformation, and continual becoming. She received her Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2025, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2020. Her work has been exhibited internationally, across Mexico, Peru, the United States, Germany, and Italy, tracing a material language shaped by migration, touch, and embodied knowledge. Beltrán Lazo was a recipient of the Graduate Studies Scholarship from Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo (2023–2025). She currently teaches in the Painting and Drawing Department at SAIC as a PTDW Teaching Fellow, and works within the Education and Interpretation department at the Art Institute of Chicago, where dialogue becomes an extension of her studio practice. She is represented by Palma Galería.
© Julieta Beltran Lazo