MARTIN CIBEIRA / BAZOOKO

My work exists between figuration and distortion.

My paintings begin with the human body, but they refuse stability. Figures stretch, fragment, merge with objects, or dissolve into the surrounding space. Anatomy becomes fluid. Identity becomes uncertain.

My understanding of the body was shaped very early in life. Until the age of eight, I lived inside a rehabilitation hospital where my father was the director. Our house stood inside the sports and therapy complex. The swimming pool where I played was shared with amputees, quadriplegic patients, and people relearning how to move after severe injuries.

For me, altered bodies were never abstract ideas. They were part of everyday life.

That experience deeply influenced how I see the human form. I never perceived the body as perfect or permanent. I saw it as something vulnerable, adaptable, constantly negotiating between damage and recovery. That tension remains at the center of my work.

I do not paint disability. I paint instability.

In the studio I begin without a predetermined image. The painting develops through physical confrontation with the surface — adding, erasing, distorting, layering, and pushing the material until the image begins to resist me. The process is intuitive and driven by impulse rather than planning.

Fragments of objects often appear in the paintings: tools, mechanical elements, interior structures. They are not narrative symbols but pressures acting on the body, as if the surrounding world were intruding into the figure itself.

Color functions as a structural force. Deep blues, bruised violets, acidic reds, and artificial lights create an environment that feels both theatrical and psychological. The space often resembles a stage where forms emerge, collapse, and reorganize.

The figures in my paintings are neither whole nor broken. They exist in a state of transformation. They carry distortion, weight, vulnerability, and resistance.

Painting, for me, is a place where instability becomes visible — where the body is allowed to shift, fail, adapt, and rebuild itself.