Painting, for me, is a form of reverse cannibalism. A ritual practice where the body is eaten so that something of it continues in another body. It feels like trying to take that digested life force back onto the plane of the painting. Eating life, digesting it, smearing it on the canvas.
I don’t want to represent life. I want the painting to come alive, unmediated, from me onto the painting, and from the painting to the viewer, standing without need for justification or context.
Everything that usually makes a painting is stripped away. Nothing is added for effect. No seductive colour, no clever composition, no mastery. The painting has nowhere to hide. Just the raw existence of marks, colours, materials, frame.
What is transmitted this way must not only hold against all odds, but feel as undeniable as life itself. In spite of all that it lacks, in spite of all that I want to believe it should be. Allowing the viewer to remain with something fragile, insufficient, and unresolved, and to wonder what, exactly, is holding their attention.
The dream is to make a painting that holds beyond sense and reason, beyond everything that usually makes a painting. Claiming a right to exist without skill, without beauty, without intelligence. Just exist. Compellingly alive. Not beautiful, not smart, not pretty. Just there.
Amandine de Mascarel is a painter based in Rome. Born in Seoul and raised in France, her work is informed by a sensitivity to disruption and the instability of meaning. After living in Nairobi, Paris, Johannesburg and Hong Kong, she studied painting at City & Guilds of London Art School.
Her practice focuses on the moment when an image begins to come alive but does not fully resolve. Working through layering, reduction and restraint, she develops surfaces where forms appear, hold, yet remain suspended. The paintings resist narrative and fixed interpretation, holding a tension between presence and uncertainty.
Recent works explore how little is required for a painting to exist without justification, while maintaining openness and doubt. Her approach is grounded in repetition, attention, and the gradual construction of a visual language that feels both inevitable and unresolved.
Education
BA Political Science
IEP Grenoble, France
1998
MSc. Anthroplogy and Development
LSE, London, United Kingdom
1999
MBA
Witswaterstrand University, Johannesburg, South Africa
2002
GradDip Fine Arts
City & Guilds of London Art School, London, UK
2025
Group Shows
City & Guilds Graduate Show
2025
Upcoming
Royal West of England Academy
173rd Annual Exhibition
Bristol, UK
September 2026 - January 2027
Solo Shows
Always Almost
San Lorenzo,
Rome
May 2026