Luiza Gottschalk (b. 1984, Brazil) is an artist based in São Paulo who paints passionately, giving body and soul to artistic creation. Interested in the action and natural chemical interactions that take place in the studio. She is deeply engaged with the actual process, guided by color, light, and matter. Layered overlays. The artist spent her first nine years living in the woods of the Mantiqueira Mountains. Her paintings evoke the power and visceral character of nature in the “crying mountains” — which is what the word Mantiqueira means in the indigenous language Tupi-Guarani. Luiza applies extra water to mineral pigments, causing them to run through thin fabrics placed over a canvas and discovering the paths they reveal to her. Her paintings are created by the very trails traced by the colored water. It’s about alchemy, but also about a silent conversation with the painting, mostly by listening and being open to what the work process reveals to her; “I see painting as a kind of portal between the planet of potentials and the planet of matter - which is where we live in. I want my works to perform the communication between them. Between planets. Between Van Gogh's capacity for emotion people and Max Ernst's fixation on juxtaposed textures and strangeness lie my desires as an artist. Color, matter and textures coexisting harmoniously to reveal images, previously submerged in the unconscious. Images, in the plural.”