My name is Milenna. I was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1979. I come from a family of musicians and artists who have really inspired and motivated me. I’ve been drawing and dancing since I was really young. My days were completely occupied by intensive Olympic Gymnastics and Competition Aerobics training. I was on the national Brazilian team competing all over the country and South America. Our team won (almost) every competition in the ensuing years and I myself had accumulated lots of medals, contusions and sketchbooks. After six years of competition, I lost my passion for Gymnastics and decided to pursue my academic interests in the arts. When I turned 18, I moved to the United States by myself to study abroad. Aerobics has given me strength, discipline and persistence, which I consider my best qualities today.

 

In July of 1998 I took the first drawing class of my life and found true love: ART! Art is the language of my thoughts. I find it easier to paint than to use words. The lights, the darks, the layers of depth that comes from playing with textures and colors, they all give me a freedom that I cannot find in Portuguese or English. Painting is my quiet way of expressing my heritage and questioning social values. My work has become a tool for me to narrate my life experiences in parables.

 

There is a connection between my work and that of Surrealists, especially in their search for the miraculous in everyday things and situations, together with their nourishment of analogical thinking. The paintings I make reflect my personal mythology. I am looking for an opening for the viewer to enter their own thoughts and words, which I create in my mind, while encouraging the projection of one’s own interpretations and dreams onto the ambiguous images I create.

My work today has a strong political background. I feel that with all the corruption, war, terror, disrespect to nature and the human life itself, as an artist I must to comment and criticize about what’s happening. My work has also some feminist tendencies.  I, as a Brazilian woman and a lesbian, living in a patriarchal world, and living in the most superficial place on earth (Los Angeles), feel the necessity to comment on how it feels to be and experience those things.

I work primarily with oil paint on canvas and wood board but I’m constantly experimenting new mediums such as video projections on painted canvas and some collage. I also work with various canvases placing them together. I find challenge in giving the canvas an extra dimension and blurring the line between sculpture and painting.

Last year I had a solo exhibition at Element Art Lounge, in San Francisco. She show was called “LOVE WILL LIFT YOU UP ~ LOVE WILL BRING YOU DOWN”.* On this series I explored the dark, painful but yet beautiful side of love in very expressive brush strokes and vibrant colors. I used oil paint over mixed medium collages that vary from ex-lovers letters to telephone book pages. With a touch of surrealism I intended connect the viewers with a very familiar feeling to all: love.

On my latest art exhibition, “TROPICS”**, that is still up at the Municipal Gallery of Los Angeles, I have created a painting installation called “Order and Progress” that consists of 27 canvases. All of them together form a map of Brazil on the wall. Each canvas represents a state in Brazil. They are semi-abstract oil paintings of different sizes, painted on a bed of articles in Portuguese that speak only about horrible things happening in Brazil today. The colors I used are the colors found in the Brazilian flag.  On top of all that I painted some photo-realist Brazilian birds (Ben-Te-Vi) and thin tree branches. That is my view of Brazil: a beautiful country, habituated by the most colorful people on earth, with the most beautiful nature; but if you look closer you see all the corruption of its government, the poverty, violence and desperation of it’s people. The bird represents me. I flew away and now comment from a different perspective, from here.
          I paint from my intuition. I paint my dreams, ideals, opinions and frustrations. Painting calms me and allows me to see better. My paintings have been and will always be an expression of my emotions and a quiet protest about this world we are living in…actually, dying in. -----------The end. Or the beginning.