Salima Black "The Hug Series: The Embrace of The Gorgons" Original Oil on Canvas

Salima Black "The Hug" Original Oil on Canvas | 2024

Image size: 39.3" x 27.5"

Salima Black's work represents mental conflicts between reason and human feelings; these conflicts generate mental pathologies such as anxiety and fear, resulting in self-sabotage. This is due to the excess of thoughts, which are born throughout life, scheme quickly within the mind, an uncertain and unknown place, without the ability to control, thus generating externalized symptoms and impulses.
Within all this Salima delves into the reconstruction and interpretation of images and symbols of Asian pop culture from the 80s and 90s. Anime, commercials and music videos obtain a new expansive purpose where a utopian universe exists, but also a nostalgic one, opening a possible escape from the tortuous reality that surrounds us.

Likewise, her paintings show within her inspiration and pictorial skill a juxtaposition between flat and volumetric forms as well as a duality between calm and chaos. The creation of solitary characters, some human in form, others visceral, are subjugated and enslaved in an eternal paranoia, condemned before an uncertain scenario ironically under a beautiful and vast blue sky.