TWOTMA
Olá TWOTMA - our third artist in residence
It was amazing to welcome Aimée (aka TWOTMA) as our third artist in residence.
We first discovered Aimée’s work at her solo exhibition at Sala Simba in Olhão in summer 2024. We loved the way she told stories through her playful and graphic style. Aimée stayed with us for a week in September 2024 and created many different paintings inspired by her surroundings whilst she was here. It was fantastic to have Aimée with us and see her creative process.
What made you want to be an artist?
I don't know if that is something you actually get to decide. As a child, I would get up early in the morning before anyone in the house and go straight to my small table, open the light and start painting. From as far as I can remember, I have always been in my own bubble where creating was the one constant search. As I grew up, went to school, high school, studies, this passion for creation never left me - but had to stay on the side, as I didn't believe in making art a real job in the future, and decided to study languages and art mediation instead.
In 2016, I was working as a gallery assistant in my hometown, Bordeaux, and simply felt like I wouldn't last long in this role: I suddenly decided to leave everything and give chance a try by taking a solo flight to Lisbon, Portugal. I had no money, no plan, I knew no one there: this sounded absolutely perfect to me. Everything was to be re-invented. This was the time when painting made its overwhelming come back in my life.
Lisbon was the most inspiring place to be for me at that time, and I would literally spend all my days outside painting everything I could see - people, expressions, figures, life scenes. A friend encouraged me to glue these drawings in the streets, which I did - and this is when it all started. People contacted me for commissions, a gallery wanted to show my work: everything suddenly got more real and serious, and I guess this is when I started to become "an artist".
This is still a word I can't really get used to - I am just doing my thing, trying to be the most honest in what I want to express and share. Let's call it "being an artist", if really necessary! ;)
What influences your style of painting?
Younger, I was obsessed with Matisse, Picasso, Gauguin, Cocteau, Léger. I would spend hours trying to reproduce their paintings - with a preference for their most simple lines, already. The works that had this power to spread an intense feeling of peacefulness, of clear simplicity, through the representation of the most common daily objects, landscapes, scenarios. The human figure caught my attention more than anything else.
Then I also was mesmerized by Chinese calligraphy, and got passionate about the notion of breath and movement using China ink, as well as the acceptance of imperfection in it.
The DADA movement inspired me a lot too, using humour to break the rules of art, making fun of the arrogance and vanity of it. Its playfulness, the desperate absurdity resulting from a rich and complex intellectual search around arts, society, politics, the "grotesque" and cynical expression of it. Its dark, mystical, strange poetry coming from a will to escape, literally, from poetry. Dada cut and destroyed the notion of beauty, and inspired me a lot in this sense.
I was also very inspired by the OULIPO, a group of language artists in the 1960ies working on the deconstruction of words through games between prose and poetry - and playing with visual translations of it.
Then more simply: everything I see, everyone I cross, every life experience has a direct influence on my creativity. I will always change and adapt my style to the place I am in and the activity around me. Nothing makes me happier than feeling my style has to move on, I am constantly looking for a change.
What do you love about Portugal and how did it inspire you with this collection?
In Portugal, I guess I love the intensity of things: the light, the colors, the wind, the cold ocean water. For this collection, I switched my black for green, as a response to the blooming nature surrounding me.
This way I also wanted to respect - and celebrate - the quietness of Âmago. Olive green, slow human figures, fruits, animals, stillness.
What are your goals for the future in terms of your artistic career?
My main goal is keeping being inspired in the present. Setting up goals is the best way to make me run away from them: I'd rather focus on the now and follow the rhythm of inspiration as it naturally comes (or not). My work is like a diary, it's a trace of the daily, and it changes as quickly and inexplicably than feelings, desires, emotions.
The goals I can set up, though, are: keeping moving places, keeping reading, keeping listening to music. Keeping learning.
Any particular highlights for how to spend a few days in the Algarve?
Take the boat to the empty beaches islands! And try Liz's banana bread in the morning, definitely!!
