Palms to the Flame Print

Marcella Colavecchio is an Austin based emerging artist whose towering figurative paintings explore timely concepts of gender and identity. Using color as a catalyst for storytelling, Marcella uses her palettes to set the tone of her “mise en scene” before any of her actors have even uttered a word. Her aesthetic favors unnatural and exaggerated light sources, leaning into artificiality to create synthetic worlds, using lighting as a means of expression. While her paintings are momentous in movement and saturated with color, they are still silent, and create a voluble visual narrative on the relationship between people, their bodies, and freedoms. These figures represent her desire to tackle issues around the push and pull of being a woman and the depiction of women in our society and popular culture. The female nude is traditionally painted under the male gaze, by painting herself in the nude, she challenges traditional dynamics by becoming both the artist and model, reclaiming power as the author and subject of her work.