Sandra Chinelate - Mimesis

Title: Mimesis
Oil painting on canvas
Frameless
Dimensions: 40 x 50 cm 3.5 cm
Totally painted edges plus a hook make the work ready to hang.
Year: 2026
With certificate of authenticity
Signed at the bottom left

The work investigates the tension between referent and simulacrum, linking two subjects that share the same visual matrix yet belong to different regimes of reality. The proximity between the organic and the artificial suspends any hierarchy between original and copy, transforming the image into a space of perceptual negotiation. In this encounter, likeness does not confirm identity but reveals its ambiguity, opening a reflection on how culture constructs, reproduces, and recognizes the real.

Sandra Chinelate, Brazilian, works on the physical and existential inquiry conducted with the tools of figurative painting. A humanities graduate, and in her youth a self-taught artist, she moved to Italy and, influenced by her multiple sociolinguistic gaze, conducts her artistic research with the aim of promoting an encounter among different social subjects, where different ages, skin colors, passions, and human misgivings are contemplated from a strong artist's desire to enhance their facets, safeguarding her characters from any pre-judgment. She dedicates herself with equal fervor to the search for detail, light, and perspective in her beloved technique of hyperrealism, in which she has specialized since her first artistic experiments. Since 2005 she has exhibited in numerous solo and group shows. She works with oil and mixed media on canvas and panel.

For the catalog of one of her most important solo exhibitions, she was reviewed by the Roman art critic Lea Mattarella, who, at the end of the review, wrote: and if there is pain, if there is fatigue, Chinelate makes use of the words of Rumi, the medieval Sufi poet, convinced that 'the wound is the place where the light enters you'".

This is the principle that Sandra Chinelate applies to the human soul she depicts as well as to objects, all in equal balance of importance and order.