Suzanna Schlemm: Paintings

Suzanna Schlemm majored in Communications.

Painting came later in her life. In 2001, after 10 years working in the advertising industry, she moved to New York City to study painting and begin what would become her true career.

Suzanna enrolled as a full-time student at The New York Studio School, where she earned multiple scholarships. In addition, she also studied at the School of Visual Arts, the New York Art Students League and Parsons School of Design.

In 2006, back in her home town of Rio de Janeiro, she was selected by the San Francisco International Museum of Women to participate in the Imagining Ourselves Project with a self-portrait. And in 2007, she had her first show in Rio’s esteemed “Parque das Ruinas” museum.

When Schlemm visits family in Longmeadow, she spends time in Northampton. Go to Schlemm's Web site.

The reception for this exhibition is on Arts Night Out, September 12, from 5 to 7 p.m.

ARTIST'S STATEMENT
“Painting is not what you see, but what you make others see.”—Degas

We are constantly surrounded by poetry, but only sometimes we are able to see it. When it happens, it is usually not on special occasions nor in fascinating settings, but rather during our most banal routines in the most familiar places. So often I see breathtaking poetry in ordinary moments – and none in those where it is formally expected. It is this invisible veil of familiarity that I try to lift with my painting.

In this specific group of paintings I tried to depict those rare moments of privacy when we can turn off the noise of the world and actually listen to our own thoughts. So it’s about privacy, but on a deeper level: it is the privacy in one’s own mind. And isn’t it funny that we usually live these precious vital moments of inner dialogues precisely during the invisible banal routines of quotidian life: in the bathroom, in bed, at the kitchen table. That’s when we reconnect with ourselves. That’s when things that really matter get decided. That’s when we can really speak up and be heard - in silence.—Suzanna Schlemm

“Suzanna’s work examines the strange familiarity of ordinary moments. It is the restless discomfort exhaling from the banality of quotidian life. Her paintings are like snapshots, fragments of trivial events ignored through the distracting passing of days, like the simple act of opening the drapes to look out the window…The act unveiling this intermediate layer, as Alberti said, is what make the passage between “the eye and the thing seen.”And what else has art searched, at least since the departure of the Gods, besides revealing the illusory familiarity of the world?” – Marisa Florido, Art Critic