EatSleepDraw • Bruna Massadas, Telephone (4/50), 2015

Artwork by brunamassadas added at 12:06 pm.

Bruna Massadas, Telephone (4/50), 2015–Present.

Learning to speak English was hard — and still is — but nothing gives me more anxiety than hearing the phone ring. Who is calling? What will they say? Will I be able to answer their questions, and, most importantly, will I even understand the person on the other side of the line? This is what paralyzes me: the phone removes all visual aids; I must rely purely on language.

Inspired by my experience as an immigrant, I have been using the phone as a motif in my pieces for the past couple of years. I am fascinated with verbal communication experienced through exclusively visual means, exploring what is gained or lost when words are left to the imagination. Telephone is a series of fifty oil pastel portraits of women talking on the phone, where visual elements provide clues to each character’s personality, but the dialogue is left to be imagined by the viewer. In these pieces, I am creating an inverted telephone experience: meaning is attained by what is seen, not what is heard.

The visual world of Telephone resists a homogenous portraiture style, ranging from representational to more abstract, each portrait exhibiting a wide range of character types, moods, and settings. This diversity in subject, along with discrepancy in style, reminds of James Ensor’s crowded paintings of manic faces — but unlike Ensor, my figures exist on their own, like magnified fragments from one of his worlds. Yet the effect of this separation is not solitude, but celebration: these women, given their own stages, are elevated to a monumental stature, much like the massive, totemic heads that adorn the Carnaval floats of my hometown of Rio de Janeiro. In this way, I envision the Telephone portraits as one big parade, where the true spectacle is the many faces that emerge from the crowd.