Another artist behind Beacon Gallery’s September show, “Be Here Now” is Raquel Fornasaro. Born in São Paulo, Brazil, Fornasaro earned a BA in Advertising and Media from the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PCU-SP). Fornasaro eventually moved to the United States, where she enrolled in the Fine Arts Program at the Corcoran School of Art & Design in Washington, D.C.
Today, Fornasaro is living in Boston and has pursued her career as an artist in full force.
Fornasaro’s work is unique, to say the least. She believes that, through her work, she shares “a concoction of thoughts about life, religion, and science.”
Raquel’s pieces featured in “Be Here Now” can ultimately be broken up into two categories: digital manipulations, which she calls the “Otherworldly”, and abstract paintings, called “Zoomorphs”. However different, both types explore the logic of perception of the consciousness of man’s place in the universe.
The first category of work, the “Otherworldly”, is a dramatization of myth and reality achieved by a composition of personal photographs, images from the Hubble Telescope, and pictures of Mars’ landscape from NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission.
The result, according to Fornasaro, is a “futuristic allegory with whimsical aspirations of an idyllic narrative.” With each image, Fornasaro hopes to question the future of our species and its relationship with the cosmos.
Although very different in both technique and subject, Fornasaro’s “Zoomorphs” do still spark the question about man’s place in the universe. These paintings, like “Tree Hugger” pictured below, blur the fine line that separates man and animal, and mention something about the precarious relationship between the two.
For this series, Fornasaro was inspired by two main sources: the Egyptian gods and the Curupira. On the one hand, the masked characters of “Zoomorphs” are a direct reference to the old Egyptian gods, representing the best in both man and nature. On the other hand, the theme of this series is influenced by the Curupira, or a mythological demonic existence in Brazilian Folklore. The myth is that Curupira preys on poachers and hunters who take more than they need from the forest. In this series, Fornasaro states that “kids take on the roles of Nature’s demonic caretaker gods.”
We hope that you will experience and question man’s relationship with the universe yourself at Beacon Gallery in September. “Be Here Now” will be open September 7th – 30th, and will not disappoint.
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