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Growing up in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from an early age Elemaria expressed a passion for art and has been a productive artist throughout her life. The colours of South America are a crucial quality in Elemaria’s work, and reveal her Brazilian heritage. She is inspired and influenced by her memories of events and life in New Zealand, Brazil, Tahiti and Mexico. Elemaria has worked with well-known Brazilian artists including, Carlos Leão, Carlos Liuzzo and photographer Antonio Caetano. Using oils, pastels, acrylic & dyes, combining figuration and abstraction, the formative strengths of Elemaria’s eclectic oeuvre lie primarily within its spontaneous and adaptable nature. She embraces spontaneity and directness in equal measure to the processes of expression, surrender and reflection. Portraiture dominates the genre-theme transcending the traditional portrait; these are personifications of the collective unconscious. A love of surface texture leads to an extensive exploration, including packing cardboard, hessian, paper, and a variety of canvases. It is this adoration of surface tactility that infuses life force into her work. Elemaria applies paint in a manner reminiscent of the way she speaks; she mixes hues in the same vein as she cooks, politically, passionately and with sensuous abandon. It radiates a kind of energy unbeknownst to the non-South American audience, but becomes an all-encompassing metaphor for the collective consciousness. The most moving and evocative within the work of Elemaria is the shape-shifting spiritual presence within the streams of paint and pastel. The people and faces within her work advance and recede, bestowing an ocular effect. They hide behind and within each other. They fight, they bite, and they integrate. They take part in pleasures of flesh, and collaboration on another plane. These are your people. These are your thoughts. This is who you are. Based in Auckland, Elemaria plays an integral part of New Zealand's unique cultural landscape, as a visual artist, and contributes to the national identity as a Brazilian-Kiwi. Elemaria includes influences from daily life in her work, such as anything that can affect her moods or perceptions. This input, as well as the modern-media assisted collective consciousness of artists around the world, including the following significant artists, amongst others, has also been, and still is, of some influence. George Baselitz – for his 'primitive perfection.'
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