Anita DeSoto

My new abstract paintings engage the shrine and the grotto as both psychic and architectural forms. The grotto functions as a metaphor for the unconscious: interior, maternal, and excessive, a space of origin that both shelters and unsettles. Long associated with the female body, the grotto becomes a contested site onto which desire, fear, and reverence are projected. The work resists idealised notions of Mother Earth or Mother Nature, instead confronting the ambivalence embedded in these figures, at once generative and threatening, sacred and abject.

Drawing from Baroque and Rococo traditions of excess, ornament, and sensuality, the painting mobilises chaotic exuberance as a disruption of psychic and cultural order. Swelling forms, ruptured surfaces, and layered gestures evoke the instability of bodily boundaries, recalling psychoanalytic readings of the maternal as a space that exceeds language and containment. The work positions the feminine not as a passive shrine for devotion, but as an active, unruly force, one that destabilises the gaze, refuses closure, and insists on its own complexity.