Karla Ruas is a visual artist, born in Montes Claros, sertão of Minas Gerais (1988 – Brazil). She currently lives and works in Porto (PT).

My practice is rooted in painting and drawing, with watercolor as a guiding method that structures the construction of the image. I am interested in the relationships between body, matter, imagination, and landscape as a field of confluence where different forms of life intersect and blur into one another.

The image is built through processes of layering, removal, and transformation, forming itself in successive strata throughout the process. I am interested in how the image does not fix itself immediately, but gradually emerges through making, in a continuous dialogue between gesture, matter, time, and memory (often imagined or constructed).

I seek to think these dynamics as a way of fabulating possible worlds, outside chronological temporalities, opening space for ways of knowing and forms of relation that escape colonial and hegemonic logics. These relations traverse both the construction of the image and the experience of the world.

In my most recent practice and research, I have been expanding the dialogue between painting and matter through the incorporation of mineral and botanical pigments, also considering matter and territory as a way of experimenting with new relationships and the creation of new worlds. In this context, I have also been interested in working at a larger scale, developing a relationship between textile and paper, seeking to create hybrid surfaces where the textile gives body and flexibility to the paper.