Camila Barreto's work unfolds through a multidisciplinary practice centered on painting and installation.Through an abstract, architectural, and deeply autonomous language, she translates memory, lived experience, the ephemeral, and the permanent into a distinctive plastic vocabulary where pictorial construction connects the inner world with outer space, transforming intimate experience into structure, tension, and presence.
Formally, she approaches abstraction on a large scale because she needs to involve her entire body in the execution of the work: she sweeps her arms across the canvas in an act of urgency—like someone waving their hands for help—driven by the pressing need to make a message visible and forceful. Yet, far from expressionist excess, that physical impulse materializes in architectural strokes and meticulously cared-for,polished lines. This precision stems from a shared feeling within the experience of being a woman: the constant demand to "stay inside the lines" and maintain sanity under the weight. In a world historically structured by and for men, marked by deep gender inequalities, women resolve and sustain daily life because caregiving falls primarily upon them: that invisible infrastructure without which nothing in the world functions.
From this vital containment emerge the four axes where artistic work and life intertwine: weight, balance,pressure, and resistance. In the series Negentropic Machines, she takes the corbel—the architectural element designed to support the weight of beams and structures—as a metaphor for this feminine support in the face of systemic inequality. She understands life and creation as negentropic acts: open systems that constantly reorganize their energy to counteract chaos, prevent collapse, and transform paralysis into action through multiple lines of flight.
This structural inquiry expands in the Self Portraits series, where she positions herself facing the horizon as a verticality in a stance of resistance to the plane. More than literal self-portraits, these works are structural cartographies: to remain upright, one must stand on more than one idea, and each idea is a line—some broken, interrupted, or contradictory, yet connected to one another—that configures anthropomorphic forms,vessel-heads, and bodies with extensions that hold offspring, weights, sorrows, and wounds. They are the structural portrait of a negentropic machine: machine woman, machine mother, and machine artist.
Each of these works is a spatial manifesto that invites contemplation, reflection, and presence in the moment,appealing to the universal while acknowledging the individual nature of whoever contemplates it. In her practice, painting is not an image: it is breath, fold, threshold, insistence; a territory where experience finally finds a way to become a world.
