Framing Intimacy

Framing Intimacy

Framing Intimacy was a project I initiated after the pandemic, at a moment when proximity felt fragile and charged. I invited different artists to spend time with me in the studio. Instead of setting out with the goal of making a painting, the painting became a trace of our being together. We moved, we spoke, we sat in silence — the canvas was not a product but a witness, the transcription of that choreography of intimacy.

What interested me was not painting as a medium but painting as a residue. Every mark was evidence of negotiation: how close we stood, when we hesitated, how our bodies aligned or drifted apart. The brush became less a tool of expression and more an extension of time shared. In this sense, each work was not about representation but about inscription, the record of an encounter that could never be repeated.

Coming out of isolation, I wanted to test what intimacy meant when it was framed. Could we re-learn how to be close? Could the act of co-producing an image — however messy, abstract, or unresolved — hold the weight of that re-learning? The project was as much about care and attention as it was about art-making. To share a surface was to share responsibility, to agree (without words) on a tempo, a rhythm, a limit.

Looking back, I see Framing Intimacy as a bridge. It was a way of carrying the body-based logics of performance into another medium, one that leaves behind a durable object while still being haunted by ephemerality. The paintings were not endpoints but echoes, traces of something that had already disappeared — intimacy condensed into pigment, gesture into surface.

The project was first presented at Veem House for Performance (Amsterdam), where the paintings were shown alongside documentation of the process, emphasizing the tension between the ephemeral encounter and its material residue. It was then exhibited at Desmayo Galería (Rosario, Argentina), where the works were re-contextualized in dialogue with local artists, underlining the multiplicity of intimacies that informed their making. Finally, Framing Intimacy was presented at the Fundació Joan Miró (Barcelona), where the paintings entered into resonance with the museum’s architectural openness and the legacy of modern abstraction, extending the question of intimacy into a broader historical and institutional frame.