Slow Growth | Karla Marchesi

Karla Marchesi

Slow Growth: Recent Paintings from Europe

A mass of plants wrap around disembodied limbs and severed digits. Chandeliers sink, waterlogged, into the swamp. Tropical fruit, torn apart with hearts and flesh exposed, sit on the cusp of decay, still giving off a sickly sweet air.

In Slow Growth, I explore the tension between attraction and repulsion through neo-rococo excess—ornate, exaggerated, yet unsettling. Instead of soft, romantic landscapes, these scenes are sharply defined. The stage lights are glaring, the focus intense. Hyper-awareness and self-scrutiny dominate. Life’s lessons often come slowly, almost too slow to notice, like the gradual growth of stalagmites. We only recognize their weight and splendour from a distance. But even when we pause to reflect, the tension doesn’t fade. Time keeps moving, sediment piling up from beneath, and erosion wearing us down from above.

My work reflects the anxieties of our present time—questioning what it means to be human in a world shaped by late capitalism and human-centered thinking. I intertwine personal stories with larger critiques of ideology, using humour and pathos. The absence of human figures speaks to deeper human concerns. Slow Growth is personal, yet universal, drawing from my experience of living between geographies, balancing the emotional tension of concurrent lives lived, and longing for connection despite feeling displaced.

In these imagined ecosystems, non-human subjects—plants, objects—become the main characters, representing agency, growth, and possibility. They expose human flaws—especially my own. Through a contemporary twist on still-life painting, I’ve developed a unique floral lexicon, staging theatrical scenes that are at once tragic and comedic—places where I can both hide and be seen.

In this mix of horror and delight, there is hope—a chance to imagine a future that embraces change, hybridity, and collaborative creation. But these lessons are slow to reveal themselves, and for me, they are best explored through the act of painting.

Karla Marchesi