Video transcript
ARTEXPRESS 2022 - Student interview - 08. Renee-Alyce Spasaro

RENEE SPASARO: Hi, my name is Renee Spasaro. I studied visual arts at Wyndham College in New South Wales. My body of work, 'Dysmorphic Metamorphosis', is a series of paintings that kind of explore my take on my experience with anorexia and body dysmorphic disorder, and it's kind of exploring that in a non-traditional way.

My artworks are 3 paintings side by side. They're all kind of large-scale portraits. And as you look through them individually, the composition kind of shows like almost a metamorphosis, like the title suggests, of a person coming into themselves or transforming into something else.

I wanted to figure out a way to recreate the way we look at portraiture and perspective of ourselves, and kind of dismantle features and the geometric angles and things like that we see on like a person's face. The triptych painting series is a combination of acrylic and UV reactive paint, demonstrating and redefining traditional applications and surface treatment in the practice of painting.

I kind of evolved my idea of my body of work by really playing with exaggeration and the idea of distorting features in an almost monstrous kind of scary way. But it's also because of the colour palette, and in a weird way, it's kind of beautiful with the small details and things like that. I intended to paint my friends in a series of different exaggerated portraits, but I ended up just doing myself.

After a lot of experimentation and with medium and also my concept, I kind of changed into developing more of like a grotesque and distinctive style of the painting I wanted to create. I'm really interested in uncovering the ways that we view a person in an aesthetic sense and the way we view ourselves, and I wanted to look at that in an incredibly exaggerated and kind of creepy way, but it still maintains its interesting beauty. I focused a lot on intense detailing in the little parts of my portraits to kind of further over-exaggerate the insecurities and imperfections that I'm trying to portray.

Initially, I wasn't too focused on the colour palette. I didn't think it would be the defining characteristic of my work. But after like realising the monstrous and overwhelming sense that my works kind of give the audience, I realised that the triptych neon colour scheme absolutely enhances that and adds to the beauty while also making it more interesting in a grotesque sense.

When I first started with my colour scheme of the neon paints and all the bright colours, I actually didn't realise that they were multifaceted and would glow under UV lamp. I realised when I was painting my nails one day. So, once I realised that, I really wanted to play with it more and I started experiencing new mediums and opening up gel pens and things like that to kind of see what I could play with in terms of colour and also the UV aspect of it.

I was really heavily inspired conceptually by Sarah Sitkin and her really grotesque and almost disgusting forms of sculpture. She kind of portrays the human figure and different aspects of life in a really disgusting and skin-crawling way. I love the way it makes you feel when you look at it. And another artist that heavily inspired me more visually is Nordlund Pierre. And her artworks are just almost haunting in the way that she uses colour and distorts figures to create a sense of a soul rather than actually the visual of a human being.

Being able to be a part of ARTEXPRESS and given the opportunity to showcase my work in a setting like that is all I kind of wanted out of my HSC. It's all that I could have asked for. I think it's really important not to stress about the way your idea is going to evolve and change because my initial idea was not what I ended up producing, and I think it turns out a whole lot better that way. But the evolution and the process of your body of work is what's really important.

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