About

Dolores Sanchez Calvo’s work explores states of anomie, ontological crisis, and the uneasy dislocation between emotional, physical, and intellectual dimensions of selfhood. Central to her practice is an engagement with trauma in its multiple registers—psychological, raw, and at times confrontational—alongside broader concerns with existential inquiry, identity, and the shaping force of our environments. Her paintings dwell in the quiet drama of the recumbent body, where figures appear suspended between rest and vulnerability, caught in moments that resist fixed narrative yet carry a profound emotional charge.

Although rooted in real and often shocking events, the figures are deliberately removed from their original contexts. This act of decontextualisation allows individual experience to transcend biography, transforming personal trauma into a shared psychological terrain that extends beyond the specific and into the universal. By denying the viewer access to explanatory detail, Sanchez Calvo confronts us with parsed, isolated images—bodies in states of extremis—onto which our own anxieties, fears, and unresolved emotions may be projected and ultimately recognised as collective truths of the human condition.

Flattened perspectives and cropped compositions deny resolution or escape, while limbs sprawl or curl with an ambiguous, almost weightless gravity that suggests exhaustion, surrender, or inward retreat. In this sense, Sanchez Calvo’s work enters into dialogue with artists such as Lucian Freud and Marlene Dumas, whose uncompromising treatments of the body foreground psychological presence over idealisation. The existential isolation of her figures also recalls the spatial strategies of Francis Bacon, where bodies are suspended within fields of affect rather than narrative space, though here tension is achieved through restraint rather than violence.

The restrained palette of earth tones—ochres, browns, muted greens, and rusts—reinforces a sense of stillness and introspection. Soft edges and diffused light blur the boundary between body and ground, as though the figures are slowly dissolving into their surroundings. This visual dissolution mirrors the conceptual thrust of the work: the erosion of clear boundaries between self and world, private suffering and shared experience. As with the charged silences of Edward Hopper’s paintings, meaning emerges not through action, but through pause and prolonged looking.

Resisting the sanitised and anodyne aesthetics often associated with representations of trauma, grief, and mourning, Sanchez Calvo imbues her figures with dignity and empathy rather than spectacle. The works challenge the contemporary impulse toward curated positivity and the shrinking space in which the full spectrum of emotional life may be expressed. In positioning the human body not as a site of action but as a locus of vulnerability, endurance, and unresolved emotional truth, Sanchez Calvo ultimately invites us to recognise trauma not as an isolated or exceptional condition, but as an integral, if often unacknowledged, aspect of our shared humanity.