Maria José Carvallo
Born: Santiago, Chile
Lives: Bristol, England
Under the Skin, 2025
Watercolour and charcoal on paper
56cm x 75cm
Maria José Carvallo explores in-depth questions about how to inhabit a body and the act of representation that this entails. Her work reflects a process of deconstructing in painting and images the assumptions of gender and motherhood that are rooted in her own culture and catholic imagery. She depicts bodies within the spaces to convey the notion of the body as both tender and foreign. Carvallo has developed an intuitive approach to drawing and painting. She draws inspiration from art history and has devoted considerable attention to representations of women by male art masters, combined with her personal and domestic imagery. She uses watercolour paintings, charcoal, pastels, installations, and mixed media artefacts as an attempt to reflect on the psychological ramifications of the act of living and being attached to others. In her images, she evokes a phantasmagorical, dreamlike world populated by haunting bodies, intertwined forms, halfway between figuration and abstraction. At the centre of her work is the human body, a body that lies, floats, dilutes its boundaries, transforms, erases, becoming a constantly mutating being. With pale tones and loose strokes and shapes, she invites the gaze to safely enter into a seemingly dystopian world, inviting the viewer to consider experiences and feelings that are uncanny, unconscious, strange and inner world.
Under the Skin explores the idea that the female body contains multiple other bodies within it. It considers how female bodies become vessels for other lives, acting as thresholds between past and future generations. In this piece, I reflect on the 'stretchiness' of our bodily conditions. It's as if one could penetrate beneath the skin and perceive what we are made of — the bodies that once contained us and their protection and vulnerability. In the work, female bodies are set against a dark charcoal background, with multiple hands exploring as though undergoing an ultrasound scan or navigating an unforeseen environment.