Maria Auxiliadora’s painting portrays multiple aspects of her everyday life and the surrounding landscape. Her subjects range from street parties, religious celebrations and parades to intimate scenes depicting the daily lives of family and friends. One recurrent theme in her work is rural landscapes, like the one we see here, featuring rural workers engaged in various collective activities. The farm named Marisol also appear in some of her other paintings. In this particular work, the human figures are represented in such a way that their identities and singularities are highlighted, either through different faces and facial expressions or the clothes they wear — which, despite their simplicity, are painted with a wealth of detail and myriad patterns, elements to which Auxiliadora pays close attention, exploring different textures and fabric colors. When viewed from a distance, the characters form a group that spans the entire canvas, creating a rhythmic composition centered around a wooden fence that traverses the scene. The fence guides our gaze along a path that suggests the various stages of food production on a farm, from animal husbandry and crop harvesting to the act of cooking on a wood burner in the kitchen. The narrative component is a central feature in Auxiliadora’s paintings. The artist is frequently telling stories through her paintings. Our attention is also drawn to reliefs produced using a combination of oil paint, polyester paste and often the artist’s own hair. The resulting mixture generates volume, projecting elements outside the canvas and giving them sculptural outlines. We can see this in the depiction of the characters’ hair, the bodies of the animals and the layers of brickwork in the kitchen.
— Danilo Cavalcante, curatorship intern, 2023
