Theresia Malaise (Antwerp, Belgium) develops her pictorial practice from a life experience shaped by displacement, observation, and continuous searching. After twelve years of travel, her work is now situated in a Mediterranean environment, where the studio becomes a space of continuity for this journey. Painting operates as a temporary site of permanence, a territory from which to reflect on memory, time, and identity.

Her work is conceptually structured through the successive layering of paint. Each painting functions as a material record of time: strata of color, gestures, and decisions that accumulate experiences, memories, and events linked to specific contexts. The pictorial process follows a geological logic, in which the final image does not erase what came before, but rest upon it. The painting process is built through the superimposition of layers, mirroring the stratigraphic logic of the terrain: gestures, colors, and decisions sediment on the canvas as temporal records.

Her paintings are not conceived as closed objects, but as fragments of a continuously evolving discourse, in which experimentation is central and the work is never considered definitively finished.

The canvas functions simultaneously as surface, palette, and archive of the process. It contains traces of previous decisions, visible marks of its own construction, and a moment of visual synthesis. Traditional painting engages in dialogue with contemporary visual strategies—cropping, sequencing, close-up—creating a hybrid space between abstraction and figuration, between the real and the absurd. For Theresia Malaise, painting is a form of excavation: an act of attention, silence, and searching, in which the image is not imposed but gradually revealed through matter.

"Her monochrome paintings, inspired by black and white archive photographs, were filled with colour and light when she arrived on the island, to the point of eliminating black from her colour palette. Her painting remains a reflection on the weight of memory and the past, on the search for identity, but now masses of colours float in space creating a mosaic of overlapping layers, as memory does. The anthropomorphic references to the past, typical of the legends of the North, have faded away, although a feeling of strangeness still pervades her work, a restlessness characteristic of those who seek to rethink reality."   Carles Jimenez for Llum del nord

'I love to observe what´s already there. It´s about finding something that makes a feeling very present, that gives a formal shape to a certain moment.

There is magic involved in making art, it is creativity in it’s purest form, with no restriction or function other then to be itself.  My process of creating involves a lot of digging and doubting. It requires silence and stillness, formal concentration and devotion in order to bring the images to the world of matter. It’s an expedition, a soul journey. It seems like a world contained within a form, a form that cannot be made up by the mind, that reveals itself when searching, when all becomes empty, until it seems like there is nothing more to be found.'