Julia Pereira Gomes, b. 1991, born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil until 13 years of age. In 2004 moves to Europe with her family, living in Belgium and Switzerland for a total of 6 years before going to Holland...
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Julia Pereira Gomes, b. 1991, born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil until 13 years of age. In 2004 moves to Europe with her family, living in Belgium and Switzerland for a total of 6 years before going to Holland to study Fashion Design at Amsterdam Fashion Institute. Came back to Brazil in 2012 and is a recent graduate at Centro Universitário Belas Artes São Paulo with a Bachelor in Visual Arts (2014-2018), also winning Best Student Award with a full scholarship for a post-graduate course of choice. She has also taken part in classes taught by painter Paulo Pasta at Instituto Tomie Ohtake during the years of 2016 and 2017 and has participated in collective exhibitions since 2015. During this time she’s also had experience being creative assistant to fashion designer Pedro Lourenço and a painter's assistant at Clube da Arte Ateliê, in addition to being a production helper for Stephan Doitschinoff. Currently working as as assistant for painter Lilian Camelli and participating in a painters study group, lead by the artist Rodrigo Bivar.
The portraits emerge from my closest personal relationships: the people with whom I have the tightest bonds, my memory of them and moments spent together. To paint those I am more intimate with is a way for me to relate to them in a different manner. Sometimes I change my mind halfway through the work and a portrait which begins being about someone, ends up about someone else. I ask myself how I can preserve the memory I have of the person being painted while I think about them and try to translate that through stroke and colour. I realize that maybe there's a gap between how I project the person in my mind and the path to the canvas. Perhaps because of my own inconsistent memory and my own dissatisfaction with the present time, I paint the same painting over and over again, until I get it "right", until I find what I am looking for. I aim to paint the truth but I feel that I won’t ever reach that entirely, and that the person I think about while painting is constantly regenerating in my mind.