Mariana Gomes (Portugal, 1983) uses painting materials with great freedom and ease, with a joyful use of color and form, sensual textures, and energy.

Her paintings always tread a fine line between abstraction and figuration. They use patterns but unbalance the entire discipline of abstraction, resorting to figurative suggestions but concealing them under the guise of a subtle abstraction.

At the same time, Mariana Gomes uses words in small paintings where she inscribes a single word or short, lapidary phrases with ironic, critical, and humorous content.

Mariana Gomes’s working method is fast and joyful, light and intense, euphoric and provocative, experimental and obsessive. Color is essential, gesture is essential, matter is essential. But words are also essential. What the painter makes visible cannot be easily expressed, and what she easily expresses (by painting words) becomes more complex because it is painted (because it is painting). Mariana Gomes uses an imagination that feeds on multiple levels of reality—this is where her paintings are born.