Three questions to Elisa Rezende
About Elisa Rezende
Elisa Rezende (b. 1992, Brazil) is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting tattoo, digital and writing. Currently based in Portugal, she has lived in the UK, Australia, and Finland: geographies that have shaped the visceral, itinerant quality of her work.
Her practice is an ongoing excavation of what it means to be human in its most unfiltered form. Through rawness, confessional writing, and symbolic imagery, she explores themes of identity, repressed desires, sexuality, and cultural constraints. Each piece becomes a site of tension between exposure and concealment, instinct and social order, fantasy and memory.
Driven by a need to externalize what is most intimate to us, Rezende’s work invites viewers into the messy, contradictory terrain of our internal worlds.
Your works often evoke a quiet introspection — moments that feel suspended in time. How did your journey with art begin, and what first drew you to this kind of visual language?
I remember very clearly the kid I used to be: bubbly, always drawn to communication, painting, writing, acting, photography... I see now that I went to study Advertising and Marketing, with the unconscious desire to be near creativity without having to be an actual artist - it was frowned upon. But my internal world has always been a subject of much curiosity to me and I have always loved profound, emotional conversations. I had too many questions and too few answers and that made me go looking - in art, people, places, travels. It wasn't until 2017, though, when my mum passed away, that I decided to quit my Advertising job, went on a quest for self-discovery (around South Asia) and found out I'd still feel lots of joy in making art. Shortly after that, I encountered Psychoanalysis and, since then, therapy has been one of my main means of expressing my deepest desires, finding out what my unconscious mind has to tell me and accepting this life as a very interesting raw experience - which I then translate into art.
Many of your portraits focus on women, often in reflective or ambiguous states. What draws you to these subjects — and what emotions or states of mind are you trying to capture in them?
Women have always been a subject of interest to me. I am a woman and I feel a lot. One of the things that has accompanied me through my life is the feeling of intense rage towards all oppressive systems that keep us, women, from living fiercely and intentionally. I guess that's the reason why I draw these raw, ancestral, almost tribal feminine figures - I feel like they have a lot to teach us, to teach me. They are grounded, regal and aware of their power - almost the same vibe as the felines (which are also a topic of interest in my art). Often these women have their eyes shut or empty, while a third eye is placed somewhere else, either their forehead or their chest. This is because they are also very wise and not distracted by things from this world. It's the archetype, the unconscious meaning, the symbolism.
Your use of muted tones and soft gradients creates a strong emotional atmosphere. Can you share how you approach color in your work — and how mood or feeling guides your process?
My feelings are always loud. If I'm sad, I'm intensely, excruciatingly in pain. If I feel joy, I you will most surely hear it kilometers away. It happens with all my emotions and creating a piece comes through a visceral desire and urge to let it all out. I have always had a thing with red in specific and warm colors in general. But the blacks, greys and blues come along too. I guess in every artwork, as well as what happens inside of me, there's always a sense of darkness and light, at the same time. Bright and dull, warm and cold colors come to symbolize our natural, human contradictions. That is what interests me the most: human rawness, secrets, entrails.
Our top selection of Elisa's works
