Alexandre Da Silva Maia

“What is real?” asked the Velveteen Rabbit to the Skin horse. This great question haunts me as a resin artist inspired by childhood memory and the magic of real/unreal nature. I love to explore how painting captures versions of the natural world while making them ornamental, for example by using materials like goldleaf and resin. My portfolio of work celebrates this dichotomy. My 'Floresta' and 'Bunny' paintings abstract forest and rural settings with a pleating, camouflaging color effect. The woods and farms by the woods are familiar and identifiable, though one cannot quite place them. They also convey artificiality in the symmetry of the pleats, and also in the manner colors merge. Do these places exist anywhere but within the imagination? Are they, in fact, like the toy bunny of Margery Williams’ story, themselves longing to be real? Quiet farmlands touching woods connect with whimsical bunnies. Scenes weave in and out of the woods, into rural Prairie settings following after the rabbits. Though captivated by nostalgia, there is no elegant decay or visual marks of time. Rather, there is an exploration of beauty in the movement to and from such spaces. Finally, the desire to tell tales is prevalent: the tales of trackless woods and rural settings captured like a photograph within the lacquered boundaries of resin. Alexandre Da Silva Maia moved to Canada at the age of five from London, England. Born in Rio de Janeiro, he has held tight to his Brazilian roots, mixed with patchwork memories from a childhood spent in the countryside both in England and the Canadian Prairies. His academic background was in English literature, and in this he received his Master’s degree from McGill University. Now, as a self-taught artist living in Toronto, he finds himself drawn to some favorite literary motifs as inspiration for his paintings; and many of these from his childhood.