I paint what memory keeps.
Oil and watercolour. Ecuadorian, working from a studio in Switzerland.
My name is Luisa Alcívar. I am an Ecuadorian artist and I work in oil and watercolour. Since I was a child I have kept memories the way other people keep objects — a landscape, my grandmother's voice, a colour I could not name at the time.
I made my first paintings at seventeen, in oil, gouache, acrylic and charcoal. Henri Rousseau came first, for the way he painted a forest that had never been seen. What I take from him is not the jungle but the permission: a place can be painted as it was felt rather than as it stood.
Now the idea comes before the surface. An image arrives from a dream world as a fragment or an impression, and I work it into oil until it holds. Some of these places are real. Others sit somewhere between memory, imagination and what actually happened, and I leave them there.
Alongside the paintings I work in photography, poetry, Land Art and installation. All of it circles the same question — how memory changes over time, and how what we have lived decides what we are able to see.
Three bodies of work, one question.
Process of the Heritage
The bond with my maternal grandmother and the ancestral knowledge she tried to pass on. Pencil sketches first, then oil and fabric on cardboard. Medicinal plants carry the spiritual inheritance.
Moments of Memory
Drawings made during a period living in the Galápagos, in the middle of the feeling rather than after it. Charcoal pencils, pastels, cord paper and cardboard.
The Memory of My Home
The Galápagos as a natural paradise and as a place holding plastic. Photographs made with one recycled bag, the landscape, and my house.
A project on growing up.
I am beginning work on childhood and adolescence — how the years that form us decide what we remember and how we come to see. If you would like to hear when it opens, the list goes out roughly once a month.