SUSANA
ROCHA
AGAINST MYSELF
Solo exhibition | DUPLEX, May 2024
Helmet (against words), 2024
Painted metal, rubber, screws and shoehorn
55x22x28 cm
Lis Flower Teeth, 2024
Painted metal plinth, dried flowers, and teeth
115x22x12 cm
Lingering feelings (discomfort), 2023
Rubber, chromed metal hooks, screws, lacquered iron and aluminium
80x45x10 cm
Death inside out, 2022
Photography on epoxy and nielsen frame
35x57 cm (Ed. 3 + PA)
Never too far from the ground, 2024
Rubber, chromed metal, epoxy, dried flowers and sponge
290x20x90 cm
Crawler, 2024
Rubber, chromed metal, shoehorn and acrylic
58x140x21 cm
Being uncomfortable is to know you are awake.
There is an internal and unpronounceable life, which establishes a battlefield that is individual and often paradoxical. This is the space from which Susana Rocha develops her work: a place of confrontation and discomfort.
AGAINST MYSELF starts from a principle of sabotage, entering the nocturnal experience of an only semi-conscious way of questioning . generating tensions that do not require prudent rationality.
Following previous projects, where the body and absence and their relationship with mourning were referential axes, the works the artist now presents seek a similar dynamic.
The dialogue between unconventional materials – rubber, metal, flowers, epoxy, teeth, jewelry and shoehorns – translates a sense of strangeness and restlessness, which references the body and evokes forms, instruments and metaphorized states that are rooted in the inner experience of simultaneous aggression and defense of oneself, against (perhaps) memories and uncertainties...
At the same time, some delicacy is necessary. And the contrasting notions of weight and suspension, wholeness and fragmentation, are equally explored, like a breath holding before a given outcome that is yet to be defined.