Cesar Finamori began the ‘Vivian Girls’ (AKA ‘Lost Girls’) series in 2016, which would develop into a sequence of brilliantly abstracted, curiously psychological paintings, including the ‘Floral’ and debuting ‘Funny, how?’ series. The selection of works on display each possess the unique quality of tugging the viewer’s fascination with all that is strange and unusual, unfurled through conventional layers of surface beauty. What is more compelling than trying to make sense of a distorted face or barely recognizable, abstract form in front of you? To understand what lies beneath?

The faces of the Vivian ladies -each with charming and unassuming maidenly names- are reformed into brilliantly abstracted expressions. Portraits of classical beauties are broken down to basic shapes and lines, -step one of Cesar’s signature technique. Bold circles and rings, once humanizing features, eyes, nose, and mouth, pour out from the forms of heavy, frenetic broken brushstrokes, against vividly saturated color fields. The jarringly warped faces yield something of the uncanny, psychologically complex -yet deviously un-pinnable- emotional narratives, all on full display, all at once. In this same vein -albeit more explosively energized- the wild ‘Laughing Ladies’ of the premiering ‘Funny, how?’ capture the erratic, somewhat indescribable states of mania, caught between frenzied laughter and horrified screaming.

The title of Vivians refers to the life’s work of outsider artist Henry Darger (1892-1973), whose obsession with gender, spirituality and power inspired a psychologically charged visual fantasy epic The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, a dark fantasy landscape, filled with psychosexual, often violent imagery and fanatical mythological symbolism. The binding tie between the Vivians of Darger’s epic and Cesar’s portraiture is purely expressive; the primal essence of this surreal tale of power and strife takes on brilliantly abstracted forms, a psychological state that soundlessly bursts from the heads of these women. Notably, Cesar also draws significant inspiration from artists such as Francis Bacon (1909-1992), Juan Miró (1893-1983) and Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), relating to techniques and theories on psychical expression and color.

The ‘Floral’ series surrounds itself in fascinating abstractions of flower still lifes, some of which after the Modern masters of the 20th century, Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) and Andy Warhol (1928-1987). The featured pieces dancing through this series however are nymphs or ‘Spring Girls’. Bright colors bubble from the girls, mysteriously dark and fixed within the murky depths of the background; a dark retelling of the myth of the spirits as harbingers of spring. Through the sacrifice of their earthy forms brings forth the new cycles of nature and life.