To create her oil paintings, Despujols works from largely candid photographs she informally takes of her family and begins the compositions with faces, conceiving the lines and contours that make up her figures’ emotive expressions before expanding outward to their limbs, poses, and settings. She constructs each portrait with heavy impasto, building paint up with frenetic brushstrokes then carving lines out to reveal the underpainting beneath. Her unstudied portraiture, combined with sculptural surfaces and vigorous mark-making, evokes the profound human interiority contained within the work of Alice Neel and Lucian Freud.
Despujols’ recent solo exhibitions include Exquisite Cuerpo, Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York; Oh Man!, Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas; Homesick, Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles; and Women and Sculpture, Spinello Projects, Miami. Despujols has participated in group exhibitions at the Orlando Museum of Art; New Child Gallery, Antwerp; Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas; FLAG Art Foundation, New York; Marquez Art Projects, Miami; Nassima Landau, Tel Aviv; and New York Academy of Art. Her work can be found in the collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art, El Espacio 23, and Marquez Art Projects.
[excerpted from Rachel Uffner Gallery website: www.racheluffnergallery.com]
