São Paulo, Brazil
Lives and works in New York

Stephanie Lucchese works primarily on painting and drawing, creating fictions in scenes that allow a peek into an invented universe where forms, fruits, plants and figures interact in constant movement, devouring themselves as time remains still.

She works from drawings to paintings with no photographic references. The result is the theatrical artificiality of a surreal light quality, and the unnerving feeling that although everything here looks edible – from the fruits up to the people, something is off. Inspired by medieval tapestries, the drama of religious art, the logical systems of sci-fi, love songs, witchcraft history, as well as pop culture elements from the 90s and 2000s and biographical details, the artist makes paintings of velvety quality and peculiar haunting.

Nature is credible, it has its own rules. If the artist’s greatest interest still lies in fiction, it’s because fiction serves as a gateway to more real places. Mythical time, the pleasure of nostalgia, entering an ecosystem according to the logic that distinguishes it from other horizons, and finding there another garden of delights; In the progress of technique, the greatest celebration of our competence is the creation of something that distracts us. Imagination is an extension of this world into another.

As narratives emerge from one same source, we can see their outlines at a glance, in traces that extend from one scene to the next, and which we try to grasp as an ongoing process of individuation.

The taste of taste, the smell of smell, the sound of sound; reality is based on an ongoing act of perception, but there is something in the perceiver that cannot be understood. The sense of taste is an invention of the appetite. What is ephemeral tends to expand before it is subtracted by time.

The fleeting ripeness of a food; in the light of geological time, the feast of the senses is an anonymous banquet and the guests have the memory of their former kings between their teeth.