Pigment, oil resin and turpentine. More specifically dammar resin extracted from a wound inflicted on a spruce, polymerising on contact with air. Each glaze a colloidal suspension of mineral matter, dispersed in a lipid matrix - iron oxidizes and silicates carbonate. The film hardens. Layer after layer, the surface thickens like sedimentary rock, light enters, light refracts. Painting mirrors a slow geological operation, a stratification of carbon and metal irons, of resin and sap. Pigments carry the memory of volcanic dust, of pressure and fossilized tears. Tears of the spruce, resources drawn from the earth, become vessels through which wounds we inflict upon the earth are articulated.

Superimposed depictions of creatures and plants, are executed with surgical precision. Loureiro’s paintings utilise expansion of scale as an invitation to shrink the recipient into a creature of the soil. Monumentality is a  gesture of   surrender. The viewer is pulled down into the strata of soil and hum, into the trembling air around a bee’s wingbeat or the electric charge of a flower’s field. Her practise insists of interconnectedness, a desire to loosen the human gaze, to imagine sight refracted through compound eyes and to feel scent through vibrating antennae. While biodiversity steadily decreases, her work asks us to remember that our own continuity is intertwoven with these organisms we overlook. In our absence earth would continue to bloom, gently over grow traces of human civilization and reclaims what we leave behind.

Loureiro’s imagery often draws from eusocial species such as bees or ants. Creatures whose collective intelligence and matriarchal structures offer alternative models of community. In her vision, these systems of care and cooperation stand against the interpretations of evolutionary biology used to justify dominance and conflict as natural laws. Instead, her paintings propose a different order: one grounded in reciprocity, symbiosis, and interdependence.

The material strategy of these works extend this ethic of care and labour. Each painting is built over months. The hand feels mechanical, it is present but almost erased, barely a visible brushwork, no trace of gesture. In this removal of the author, Loureiro perceives painting as a act of devotion. The slow pace of the process opposes the acceleration and overproduction of the Anthropocene. The process itself becomes a temporal organism, refusing disposability.

The work voices a refusal to let the small and transient dissappear. The beings observed though her work, have outlived and pre dated empires: butterflies have inhabited earth for over 200 million years, while their lifespan, depending on genus, concludes between 30 - 280 days. These short lived beings are rendered in a medium that may outlast its maker - perhaps even its era and may one day be a requiem to a species that once was; transforming painting into a fossil of attention and an archive of care. Thus her work becomes a devotional practice and a votive offering to the depicted creatures.

2025, Melanie Loureiro