Gokula Stoffel

Critical text

Gokula Stoffel (b. 1988, Porto Alegre) always employs pictorial procedures to create her work. The self-taught Brazilian artist relies on different supports, from tapestry, embroidery, fishing nets, glass to aluminum foil to assemble tridimensional and wall pieces that invariably report to painting. By often deviating from traditional materials such as paint, brushes, or canvas, Stoffel’s work deliberately inhabits the apparent contradiction between the unmistakable presence of a painting and the volatility of the digital image. The human body has a fragmented appearance in her compositions, strands of hair, allusions to arms and legs, textile wefts, and leftover clothing permeating the works. Amid the overwhelming world of images and information in which we live, Stoffel has found her vocabulary in the behavioral changes generated by the technological boom we are experiencing and investigates the place of the image in the contemporary world. For Present Future, the artist presents a series of works in various mediums and materials, through which she invests in experiments testing the limits of painting itself. In a modus operandi opposed to linearity, the artist superimposes thoughts and moods in an empirical process that combines disparate materials.

Text by Fernanda Brenner