Artist Feature: Cristina Troufa
"How I feel in the present, in the society that I live in."
Rather than mirror the world around her, Cristina Troufa mirrors her inward journey of self-realization through her paintings, where her “self” plays the muse. Through her psychological and emotional self-portraits, she gains a deeper understanding of her purpose. While her self-subjects hold the spotlight in her work; weather they are found playing with matches, embracing each other, or quarreling; the negative space within her work also plays an important role. This absence of space removes time and context from her compositions, offering the reins to her subjects on their complex journey. Troufa states, “In my work, the women’s world view is the unseen world, so the clothes or shoes they wear are not relevant. The scenarios created are about my spiritual side, my beliefs, about my past and how I feel in the present in the society that I live in. Reflecting my doubts, my certainties, and the need to be a better person and to grow in several levels of my soul and life.”
Troufa’s focus on personal development, spiritual and emotional, metaphorically narrates her states of mind within moments of healing, surfacing self-knowledge and self-questioning. “When I once had to do a review of my work, I discovered that the topic death existed insistently in my work. Not in a negative way, but rather a search to understand the possibility of life beyond death and reincarnation, a subject that has always intrigued me and that I believe. My work turned into something spiritual, a route between several lives and several times in the same life, coexisting side by side from strategies of self-representation that ultimately question the meaning of life.”
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Cristina Troufa is a Portuguese artist born and based in Porto, Portugal. Cristina holds a Licentiate Degree in Painting (1998) and a Master’s Degree in Painting (2012), both from The University of Fine Arts of Porto. Since 1995 she has participated in both collective and solo exhibitions, in art galleries and cultural spaces throughout the world. In 2014 and 2016 she was an invited artist at the Biennial of Contemporary Art in Salerno, Italy. In 2015 she was a jury member of the project “PortugArt” in London, in the selection of Portuguese artists for a collective exhibition in the same city and in which she was a guest artist.