The Artist

Through painting with resin application, Brazilian-born Canadian artist Alexandre Da Silva Maia offers glimpses into the imaginative universe of his childhood. Scenes weave in and out of woods, into rural Prairie settings following the rabbits. Though captivated by nostalgia, there is no elegant decay or visual marks of time. His painting shows an interaction between magical realism and abstraction, the artificiality of ornamental, baroque stylings of rustic and familiar landscapes.

Narrative influences include Angela Carter’s reworking of  the adult Fairy tale form and, of  course, Richard Adams’ world according to rabbits in the classic novel ‘Watership Down’. In  particular, Da Silva Maia highlights the fairy tale motifs explored by the cultural critic, Marina Warner, as inspiration for his “possible worlds.” Added to this, the music of Sergei Prokofiev’s ‘Peter and the Wolf’, which showed the artist from a young age the tension between the freedom of childhood coexisting with warnings imposed by Nature and the world of adults. So going back and forth to childhood memory can be analogous to the shadowy paths in and out of forest landscapes. Alexandre Da Silva Maia’s body of work engages in tale-telling, of trackless woods and rural settings captured like a photograph within the lacquered boundaries of resin.