June Canedo de Souza: All top teeth knocked out at once

In the painting rodeo heart-teeth clenched- wide mouth-looking bush, I see two bundled fists crossed at the wrists above the crown of a man’s head, all outlined with sweeping marks of deep brown. It is as if I am floating above a man extending his looming hands. I can see both the inside creases of palms and outside folds of fingers closed in a grip -- what a clenched fist might look like from the inside. I ask myself if they really are fists or open palms. An open palm and a closed fist? A cloudy diffusion of green coalesces with murky atmospheric black and peeks of chalky orange and yellow. To me, these are the hues of a fresh bruise. Only closer looking and minutes in, reveals light drawings atop the right extremity resembling the skin of strawberries or the center hearts of a flower. I remember beating hearts are often said to be the size of fists. 

June’s paintings are not meant for short gazes. The content of her canvas is not lightly consumable. Her works unravel phantom memories if you choose to open yourself in front of them. These are works swollen with the artist’s bodily vulnerability, made accessing a deep somatic impulse: furious excavation at the surface, unrestrained circular gesture, and intentional points of meditative marking. The works are vehicles of essence, of core memory, displaying what the body has clutched and guarded as it is released through the hand.

A contemporary viewer often looks at a painting with an expectation for the artist to serve an experience and to be moved emotionally. Throughout June’s painting practice, she is often asked to identify where the work contains a remnant of her narrative trauma or suffering. It’s a question many artists receive from an art world expecting them to unveil secrets, to feed an insatiable curiosity for ‘the other’ and expose a romantic world of pain. Instead of feeding the viewer’s expectation to receive, June produces a provocation, an invitation to look deeply within, not outward. 

One Friday in February, six women, two men and a few babies sat in June’s studio and shared thoughts on the paintings in All top teeth knocked out at once. “What do you see?” June inquired of her visitors. Like a rorschach test, what unraveled was a process of tapping into an internal catalog of floating shapes, textures and varying opacities of color. Then, identifying an image that lives in the recesses of one’s visual memory and conjuring the psycho-social meaning we, ourselves have attached to it.

Though each work is distinct in its abstract quality, certain motifs are shared throughout the collection: the yellowing globular form, the stacked stratum of paint you see due to severe excavation, and grids like protective mediations. In 3am pond view from the only yard that echoes (2026), a warp and weft pull across a mass of murky marine hue where pods like burial shrouds or insect eggs hang toward the bottom edge. The grid is a ghostly baby blue in root mends bed and all the women before me (2025) where egg-like cocoons the color of chartreuse look to be spilling out of an invisible source. And a swath of white paint redacts space around a central mesh-like screen concealing a haze of color in people, related party, behind window unit of an apartment building (2025.)

A woman in the studio that day remarked at the breadth of emotions she felt looking at these works but overwhelmingly saw a teetering between dark and playful. The woman’s partner had a different take. “I saw pain, grief, anger but had more trouble connecting to the playfulness. There’s a lot of ancestral qualities but maybe I equate that with grief?” she asked. 

In general, art audiences may desire to ‘get it,’ to feel clever at ascertaining obscure metaphors, or for an artwork to reveal its meaning through high references. After one accepts that the references have been obliterated, the nostalgia wiped out, the emotional response of the individual viewer is the only thing left standing in front of the oil paint on canvas. Instead of accommodating the viewer’s appetite to be fed, these works ask their perceiver to enter a liminal space and get uncomfortable. This struggle to identify what surfaces in one’s body, to confront an existing internal emotion or memory, creates an energetic connection that closes the distance between viewer and maker. It is what the painter Susan Rothenberg called ‘empathic magic.’