Ana Manso

Ana Manso’s paintings and installations navigate the spaces between contamination, intersection, and exchange, attending to the infinite potential emerging in the often overlooked and quiet details of everyday life. Primarily rooted in abstraction and occasionally extending from canvas to mural, her work emerges from sensory moments with no predetermined plan, inhabiting the invisible paths where spontaneous gesture meets perception. The transitional moments connecting action, medium, and external conditions—from the processes of stretching the canvas and preparing its base, to the painterly, intimate surrenders between creator and work—reveal each painting as a unique, unbidden force that may attract or repel the artist’s gestures at any moment. Through the layering of acrylic and oil paint with other mediums of lesser artistic notability (such as tie-dye, stencils, and stamps), the fixed pictorial orientation dissolves amid cycles of creation, mirroring the mysticism of transformation and reinvention found in the natural world—tides, moons, seasons, and the artist's own femininity. Manso’s slow, ritualistic processes (also born from her experimentations with ceramic and other materials), honor the specific rhythms of each entity, imbuing her paintings with a freedom that allow for movement in the different colors, formats, and temporalities of endless plastic possibility.