Raphael Fonseca: How do you feel painting at this moment in history? Our generation has often been associated with another “return to painting”; I recently saw an issue of the German magazine Texte zur Kunst dedicated to figurative painting...

MW: Even though I'm thinking about installation work, created for the space, it comes from the perspective of painting. Everything I look at is connected by this spectrum of painting. Painting is related to this idea of the first images and I'm very interested in this idea of original images. This goes back to the origin of humanity as images that bring to mind centuries, wars, annunciations, moments… I think I also have these images imprinted in me. My painting has a lot to do with this place of annunciation; that might be why I sometimes think in large scale, which really captures me, is incredible. So, is there a kind of “reference to the reference” – in this case, that of figurative painting – yeah, I have no problem seeing my work being related to that and it interests me very much.

RF: I feel that your works often have ghosts from the history of art that you are dialoguing with. Broadly speaking, how do you see this relationship develop in your practice with time?

MW: I'm very fascinated with old images in general, but it always seems to captivate me to have a mirrored relationship with those images, when I manage to bring them to the present. I collect a lot of images and I often don't research exactly what it is so as not to be contaminated by it; so I see an incredible drawing of body and I try, at first, not to go so deeply into that image historically, but to “steal the drawing.” I do that a lot: sometimes a painting has a drawing that came from a Roman mosaic and I add a body that I “took” from Rodin - in quotation marks because I don't know how to copy that well either. I think this is also a plus in my work because I don't know how to do it that well, so it's kind of a “weak” translation, you know? I like that too.  It's obviously a little frustrating at times because I can't reproduce the drawing, but then something happens that gets a little weird and then BOOM, okay, there it is. I like going into painting first through drawing and then linking one thing to the other.

RF: In your research there is a kind of revulsion to emptiness... When we look at your paintings and drawings, there's always something going on in a corner. Can you talk a little about that?

MW: It's actually a little crazy, because the amount of times I go in to do a painting and think “I want this painting to be a lot emptier or with less stuff” is huge. It's a little wild; I think this filling in comes as a kind of correction. It's a pretty obsessive correction, of filling in with the intention of transforming things. It feels like I need the eye to walk through the painting many times... For it to be a kind of trap to the gaze and I do it like that because I paint while my eye moves from place to place, until I go oh! It needs to stay longer here, and that goes on until it turns into a tangled thing.

RF: What relationships do you see between your images and the notion of pleasure and eroticism?

MW: This thing of the eye moving through the image, I think there is a relation to pleasure in that. And when I think about my state – me, Maya, physically, psychologically and bodily – while I'm working, it's similar to moments where I experience other pleasures. It's a state of euphoria, a little bit of anxiety, of falling in love with the image... There's a lot of that. There's something very seductive too. In the exhibition I did last year, Espelho espanto [Mirroring Astonishing] this idea reverberated later... This narcissistic relationship with the work, of it being above everything, of being something made directly by you. I think the artist experiences something that is very seductive, which is this doing something with the hands and it being directly yours... In my practice, at least, this is very important. It's connected to something a little corny about falling in love, but narcissistically. The pleasure is also very narcissistic because we see ourselves very closely when we paint.

RF: Since you're on the topic of pleasure and narcissism, I would like you to talk about the importance of beauty in your work.

MW: I think that, sometimes, my use of color brings a lot of this interest in the beautiful because, again, things are often not how I would like... The characters and people that appear in the painting are caricatures, rather strange figures. It's funny because when you choose a reference or someone, they're not extremely beautiful within the standards of beauty in Western painting, but at the same time, I think there's this sort of pain and damnation in the whole thing and that for me is where I also see beauty... I've never liked a very sugar-coated painting, that's not so beautiful to me, you know? Beauty is something I do think about, but it always comes with traces of something kind of bitter, a little weird, a little funny. I've been thinking about that a lot, about the humor in the work, so the people are a bit weird, they're a little freaked out, kind of off-putting.

RF: How important is color in your research and what is your choice process like? Do you imagine, draw and think those relationships previously or does everything happen when the tubes are in front of you?

MW: That scene you just described with the tubes in front of me is exactly how it happens; I don't do color studies, sometimes I draw a picture, but not in color. Color is very intuitive in the work and there are times when it comes in this place of error, but it is very interesting because color also puts me in this state of correction within the work. Sometimes I go in with a completely wrong color just to be able to correct it... Then I go in with strange colors that I know will later force me to change everything. I'm a bit of a kamikaze with color because I'm not choosing from a magenta that's going to be the shadow of a yellow, for example. Many of the situations that interest me in painting start with these "wrong colors"... But there is something intuitive, as well as a studio covered in images. There are a lot of papers, some images are paintings, a few others are photographs, but I like to look at a corner of my studio where there are books and it's amazing how there are some very interesting color combinations there. I always like to keep some fruit around and sometimes I look and ah! I look at the tone, it's like there's always something randomly happening along with it... When everything is very premeditated, it's like I lose interest. It's a combination of disorder and chance.

RF: It is noteworthy that you are not an artist interested in working solely on canvases with predefined formats. There are works in which you even rethink the hard surface of the canvas and the stitching. Something very artisanal interests you, as well as mural paintings... I would like you to tell us a little about your interest in leaving the more traditional format and what your relationship with space is.

MW: Now I'm very much in this moment of curtains and portals, with this simple idea of paintings to walk through or to walk by, or to be with. At the same time that I do a painting that is sometimes a curtain, I walk over to the stretched canvas and do a mid-sized painting. It seems like I need to have both, but I think there's something that made me start thinking about a loose painting, a painting for the space, of cutting, making... First, simply for the fact that I almost never had the space I wanted for the works, so I always had to have a rolled canvas instead of it stretched out on a large frame. I already viewed the canvas as more dismembered and I always liked to paint on the wall and not the wooden frame; there's something about me pressing hard when I paint and when the canvas is stretched on the frame there's this soft space in between the frame and the wall. So, I like to do things directly on the wall.  Now I'm thinking about building spaces with paintings.  I'm finishing my first curtain now and have been thinking about the portals.

RF: Finally, I would like to ask you about the possibility of looking at your work from the perspective of the clash with our day-to-day lives and with recent historical facts. What is this "essence," so to speak, of everyday life, of banality, that your research has?

MW: I think the work will be, in a way, a spawning of our own time. I only have one interpretation of this, a kind of relationship between the grotesque that we're living with the paintings, after the image is finished. This is never an intention in the painting, but it's not surprising when I look back and yes, it has to do with the moment. There's this desire to make fun of it sometimes or do something that has nothing to do with it... It's like an escape. I like the work being able to carry many perspectives. The interesting thing, for me, is to see how it will relate to other works, other spaces, where it will go, with whom, what will be said about it... Because before that, and again with the narcissistic thing, in the studio I live an almost romance with these images, but I’m also open and feel good talking to the audience and learning from what they are seeing.