Soumisha Dauthel

Change Your Mind
assembled paintings, oil and acrylic on paper
29.52 x 21.25 in.

I began my artistic career with performances and installations with the problem of the body and its limits in space and time. I used my body in relation to organic materials such as clay, plaster. It was after my residency at Casa Velázquez in Madrid, Spain (1986) that I started painting with more traditional mediums such as oil, wax, grease crayons, and charcoal. I visit the Prado every day.

It was a long period of research that led me to invent a process of creation in 1990. In order to preserve a form of freedom in the act of producing, before the final realization of the work, I differentiate the moments of creation. My medium is the trace of the moments of oil painting, acrylic, Posca, ink, charcoal … on paper, cardboard or canvas (pictorial material). These pictorial materials will then be selected, assembled to propose forms and approximations of colors in their singularity, their uniqueness.

The idea that I explore continuously is the “superposition of temporalities”, which can be translated by the question “What is being in the present? How do we live in our head and in our chair, this present?”

Are we detached from our thoughts, our stories of life, the memory of peoples, women and men? This vast philosophical and spiritual question transpires in each of my works. This idea is expressed by organic parts in their manufacture, by the manipulation of the pictorial material and by an assembly technique.

© Soumisha Dauthel