Talita Hoffmann is a painter in São Paulo making work influenced by her landscape and a fascination with the life cycles of architecture. Beyond the practical, these structures literally represent the ups and downs of urban construction and destruction embodying the rhythms of life. An abandoned, neglected building still echoes the community that once inhabited the space.

The digital age has a significant impact on how artists see the world, and Talita creates glitch-like visions based in reality that reflect the visual collages our eyes consume constantly. Glitches are alluring to artists, like holes in the matrix, phantasms that somehow humanize the computer, and Talita combines and renders them in a way that elevates their significance, speaking to the new fusion of humans, technology, and urban development. Her perspective is an aesthetic juxtaposition of beauty and decay, and her paintings ask all the right questions.

Read this feature and more in the February 2017 issue of Juxtapoz Magazine.

Kristin Farr: Figures have become noticeably absent from your newest work. What happened to them?
Talita Hoffmann: I started to get more interested in architecture and the relations of space and perspective that some landscapes and juxtapositions provide. The human figures were beginning to tire me, in a sense that I thought they brought a certain psychological load that I just wasn’t interested in talking about anymore. The human action that appeared on the landscapes, its indications and traces, started to have a more interesting subtlety to me.

You’ve also been creating paintings with ghostly layers. How did that technique come about?
I think this type of image comes from my interest in graphic design and technical drawings. I like the overlaid aspect in which these images appear in the world—the internet, newspapers, ads. It’s a drawing before its concrete final form, existing only in line, color or structure.

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Would you say your work is imagining a post-apocalyptic future? Or is it open to interpretation?
I like to be open to interpretation, of course, but I don’t think I imagine it as a post-apocalyptic future. Our present is already pretty post-apocalyptic, right? But, for example, in 2013, I did a series of paintings based on portraits that Walker Evans took of the South in the United States, post-depression. They were images from the 1930s of some destroyed and abandoned landscapes that, in some way, seemed very timeless to me. I thought they had something to do with my work, so I used them as reference for some paintings. But I didn’t want to talk about the past exactly, maybe more about a timeless landscape that doesn’t have a lot to do with nature, but with people.

Do you have stories in mind for the images?
I prefer the ambiguous narratives, and the possibilities of abstraction that some overlaid images can bring to the reading of a work. Some people have said that the juxtapositions that I do remind them of the digital reading we have of the world, and the simultaneous narratives it suggests, with the internet, for example. I think that’s an interesting possibility.

What do you use for source material?
Images from newspapers, magazines, old catalogues, and product packaging that has some interesting design, as well as cell phone pictures that I take of places on the street. In my last show from 2015, entitled Areia Movediça or Quicksand, I used a lot of Google Maps images, especially images that the app generated with glitches.

What attracts you to glitches?
I like glitches because they are mistakes with the image patterns from our times that people have gotten used to, and learned to incorporate in the daily reading of these apps. And in the case of Google Maps, I find it even more interesting because it’s about physical images of houses and streets that are completely reconfigured randomly, and the system and its users sort of ignore this language that has many similarities with the process of collage. It’s a creative operation that technology does by accident that I find very poetic.

Me too. When did the biggest shift happen in your paintings and what caused it?
I think the moment I started to paint bigger canvases, my relation with the composition of the work totally changed. There’s something about the position of the painter in front of a big canvas that completely changes once you face this challenge. I had already painted some murals on the street, but the work time you put into a canvas is different, and I wanted to bring this corporeal relation of the mural to the canvas.

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What do you like about the experience of working in public?
What I like the most about murals is this time of the process, the physical tiredness, the coffee breaks and the conversations with the people around the work being done.

Where do you find inspiration from your own environment and community?
For the Quicksand show, my main source of inspiration was my surroundings, as I had just moved downtown to the center of São Paulo. As any other major capital, São Paulo has so much construction, lots that are waiting for buildings to be demolished so that others can be built in the same place. This constant movement of architecture reminded me a little of the concept of quicksand, where nothing stays still for too long.

I like to think about the constructions and architecture of my city and how this constant shifting in the juxtaposition of landscapes affects us daily. The reading that we make of the city is always changing, but these constructions don't necessarily bring progress—like with real estate speculation, that is the main disastrous effect of this type of urbanistic thought. But I really see it as a challenge. I think my goal is much more to propose reflection than to point out directions.

Is the production of waste that comes with with constant urban construction something you consider?
Yes, I guess it does concern me. Not only waste production, but more than that, there are twice as many vacant buildings in São Paulo as there are homeless families, and those numbers are ridiculously huge.

It’s really incomprehensible. I noticed a painting with handcart silhouettes. Are they symbolic for you?
The handcarts, as well as some other work tools, interest me firstly by the formal aspect they have—objects of very simplified geometries—and also by the fact that this simple object carries so much significance in terms of manual labor. This simple movement of taking something somewhere, this very basic work activity, appears to me to have some sort of relation to this simplified geometry.

Does painting help you make sense of the world and/or is it a therapeutic process?
I guess making art and thinking about it—yours or someone else’s—helps in subjective changes in our thoughts, and that’s the best way to make sense of the world. Not only in visual arts, but also in music, film, literature. There’s always a political aspect to trying to make sense of the world, so I don’t think it’s therapeutic.

What are favorite stories that you often return to or find comforting?
I’m influenced by storytelling and literature, and I think my work has some relation to Realismo Fantástico authors such as Julio Cortázar, with these nonsense elements in mundane environments. But I don’t have any favorite story in particular. Actually, Bob Dylan is a folk myth that I find very comforting and inspirational. Does he count?

Definitely. Do you connect with folk art practices or have connections to them?
I like folk art and music, especially American folk music from the 1960s. Since I was a kid, Brazilian folk and naive art was something that really impacted me, artists such as Djanira, Véio, Heitor dos Prazeres, or even Tarsila do Amaral and Alfredo Volpi, who are not naive by any means, but are naive-influenced. But I guess, more than anything, I’m attracted to the simplicity of it, and the political thought behind it. Among other things, you could say that naive art has a very “do it yourself” attitude.

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Who are some artists you like to collaborate with?
I’m a huge fan of Jaca and Fabio Zimbres, two Brazilian artists who are also from Porto Alegre, like me. They work a lot together and I would love to be a third element there. Also, Robert Crumb would be a dream come true; and while we’re dreaming, it would be amazing to travel back in time and go out for an afternoon of photo-shooting with Walker Evans or a day in the zoo painting with Henri Rousseau!

Yes! Rousseau’s jungle zoo. Your earlier figures seemed to be hybrid animal-people. How did you describe them?
They really were these animal-people hybrids; but again, the abstracted and simplified characteristics were what really attracted me. Like the minimum drawing that shapes an animal or a human expression, those characteristics that can minimally express some action or feeling.

I’ve always thought about that too, how the lines to create an image can be so simplified and still be legible for most people. What do you like about abstraction?
I think the strangeness that abstraction causes, not only with shape and color, but also landscape fields, interests me the most.

Did you make art as a kid?
I always drew a lot, as any kid, but I wouldn’t necessarily call this art. My father also paints and draws and I remember being very impacted with this ability to create images from scratch. He also showed me a lot of Brazilian naive art that turned out to be an influence on my work today.

What’s your idea of a perfect day?
I really like rainy days, and If I could be inside drawing or painting, listening to music, drinking coffee and hanging out with my cat, Milton, the day is perfect. Also, São Paulo has lots of cultural activities, and usually I’m really caught up in that, with concerts, art shows and random events in the streets... but sometimes it’s just great to stay inside.

Tell me about Milton.
What can I say about the studio boss? He loves catnip, watching The Office, sleeping on top of important papers, and overall just being this asshole that we love. Recently he got the habit of scratching his nails on some canvases that I have leaning up against the wall in a corner. I hope it’s not his way of criticizing my work.

That would be a harsh critique. Are there places you'd like to travel specifically for architectural inspiration?
I would love to travel to the south of the United States that I saw so much through the Walker Evans pictures. But I imagine these places are much more poetic in my mind than they are in reality nowadays. Russia is a place I dream to meet, and also Mexico. In terms of art sources, São Paulo has been pretty satisfying.

What is your studio like?
It’s a relatively big room in downtown São Paulo. It’s on top of a street that’s famous for selling speaker systems, so there’s always this awful and very loud music coming from the outside. But I learned to ignore it. Other than that, I try to be as organized as I can with materials, but it’s always a mess. I always have a notebook in hand to write out ideas and there are always many reference images opened on my computer. Sometimes I have a random movie playing as background sound, or podcasts.

What will you be working on in 2017?
I want to work on a new series of paintings, but exploring more works with collage, which I have been doing this year. I’ve been having this interest in gates and electric fences, their grid drawings and what they mean in the cities. But I can only tell once I’m working on them, it’s hard to say in advance what direction the work will take.

If you could hear your paintings, what would they sound like?
Last month I saw Kim Gordon’s new project, Body/Head, here in São Paulo, and I thought the energy and abstraction they had in the live performance was just amazing. If my paintings could sound anything like that, I would be more than happy.

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Originally published in the February 2017 issue of Juxtapoz Magazine, on newsstands worldwide and in our web store.