Silvana LaCreta Ravena

My work explores memory, belonging, and the persistence of experience.

I am interested in the traces that experiences leave behind and in the ways they continue to shape our relationship to places, histories, nature, and one another. Through painting, photography, objects, and installations, I investigate how memories are inscribed, carried, and transformed over time.

Drawing from landscapes, historical references, sensory encounters, and personal experiences, I create works that seek to give form to what remains: the marks, connections, and resonances that endure beyond the moment itself.

Rather than representing memory, I am interested in creating spaces for recognition and reconnection—moments in which past and present, individual and collective experience, may briefly converge.

Silvana LaCreta Ravena’s work unfolds as an ecosystem of layers in which wax, oil, resin, and pigment function as instruments for editing time.

Encaustic does not appear as a decorative effect, but as a method: it welcomes traces, preserves processes, and allows for revisions without erasing the history of the gesture. Ravena is interested in the friction between matter and memory—surfaces that breathe, edges that do not conceal themselves, transparencies that invite a slower gaze, one capable of reading at the pace of making.

Her visual vocabulary is tactile and embraces error as a form of language. Folds, veils, and marks of passage replace the desire for a “resolved” image with an ethics of process: residue becomes structure, accident becomes decision. In this way, painting, collage, and sculpture cease to function as rigid categories and instead behave as interpenetrating modes, guided by what the material itself demands. The result is a presence that exceeds the visual; it lingers in the body of the viewer.

On a chromatic level, the artist works with temperatures and densities of light rather than descriptive palettes. The translucency of wax creates zones of suspension that make the gaze vibrate within the in-between, while contrasts of density organize perception as a kind of breathing time. The emphasis is not on effects, but on rhythms—pulsations that bring elements closer together or farther apart, establishing pauses, accelerations, and emphases that the eye perceives before it can name them.

When this mode of thinking reaches the realm of wearable art, the research retains the same logic. Her so-called body sculptures transform line and volume into inhabitable contours: they are not ornaments, but devices for experience. Form is completed through movement, breath, and the listening body that activates it. Each act of wearing rewrites the drawing, reiterating the idea of layering, now applied to the skin—a memory awakened through its friction with the present.

Drawing on the refined attentiveness shaped by her background in psychology, Ravena treats material as a site of care: wax preserves, resin suspends, thread embraces. Rather than offering iconic certainties, she offers states—provisional yet intense presences in which gaze and body participate together in the construction of meaning. It is within this continuity between surface, volume, and skin that her language finds recognition and endures.

“Reworking, reconnecting, and suspending different or unexpected aspects has always permeated my creative processes and forms part of a broader approach—perhaps even a way of observing life itself—grounded in the idea of reconnection.”

(by Roger Monteiro, editor, Safari Magazine No. 4, Zebra Editions, BR)

Work Experience Brazilian-born professional artist working at Silvana LaCreta Ravena Studio (since 2006) Art history teacher (SP, Brazil, 1996-2005) Art Therapist and Clinical Psychotherapist (1985-1998)

Master of Fine Arts, Post Graduate degree: Art History Specialist Post Graduate degree: Art Therapist Specialist, Bachelor of Science

Selected Solo Art Exhibits ( Exposições Individuais):

2026 “Noites da Floresta”, Vera Simoes curator, sponsorship UNILA, support ITAIPU, Universidade de Integração da America Latina, Foz do Iguaçu - PR

2026 “Noites da Floresta”, Vera Simoes curator, sponsorship UNILA, support ITAIPU, Ecomuseu de Itaipu, Foz do Iguaçu - PR

2026 “Noites da Floresta”, Vera Simoes curator, sponsorship UNILA, support ICMBIO, Urbia Cataratas, Parque Nacional das Cataratas, Foz do Iguaçu - PR

2026 “Noites da Floresta”,Vera Simoes curator, sponsorship UNILA &Conjunto Nacional, support ICMBIO, Conjunto Nacional, São Paulo – SP

2026 “Noites da Floresta”, Vera Simoes curator, Galeria VerArte, São Paulo – SP

2024 “Conversas com o Tempo”, Angel Oliveira curator, Casa 100+, Porto Alegre , SP -BR

2023 «Capoeira», Vera Simoes curator, Julio Prestes Station, Cia Metropolitana de SP – SP, BR

2022 «Noites da Floresta», Vera Simoes curator, Galeria VerArte, SP - BR

2020 «Arqueologia da Cor II », Vera Simoes curator, Morumby Metro Station, Cia Metropolitana SP, BR

2019 “Arqueologia da Cor”, Vera Simoes curator, Galeria VerArte, São Paulo- SP, Brazil

2018 “New Embodiments, Luisa Vincent curator, Veronique Wantz Gallery, Minneapolis,USA

2017 “Travel embodiments”, Wendy Frieze curator, Nash Gallery, MN, USA

2106 “Wanderlust”, Artwork Network Gallery, Denver, CO

2016 “Interdimensional”, Veronique Want curator, VW Gallery, Minneapolis, MN, USA

2015 “Works on Paper”, Wendy Frieze curator, collection WM, Minneapolis, USA

2015 “Silvana Ravena”, Owatonna Art Center, Owatonna, MN, USA

2015 “Vivid Visions: Pristas, Ravena, Botero”, Artwork Network Gallery, Denver, CO, USA 2014 “Silvana LaCreta Ravena 2014”, Artwork Network Gallery, CO, USA

2013 “Silvana LaCreta Ravena”, Artwork Network Gallery, Denver, CO, USA

2013 “Moroni and Ravena”, University of Minnesota Clinic, Minneapolis, MN, USA

2013 “Textured Translations”, The Phipps Center for The Arts, Hudson, WI, USA 2013 “An Archeology of Color”, Bloomington Center for the Arts, Bloomington, MN, USA

2011 “In Search of Beauty”, Nina Bliese Gallery, Minneapolis, MN, USA

2011 “Artwork Network Gallery Features Silvana Ravena”, AN Gallery, Denver, CO, USA

2011 “Off The Wall”, Hopkins Center for the Arts, Hopkins, MN, USA

2009 ”Encaustics by Silvana LaCreta Ravena”, Hopkins Center for the Arts, MN, USA

2009 “Memory Moves”, Bohlander Gallery, Minneapolis, MN, USA

2008 “Ravena and Dollar”, WARM Gallery, St. Paul – MN, USA

2005 “Women Sitting on a Bench In a Piazza”, Carmen Perrone Gallery, SP, Brazil

1998 “Daily Scenes”, Bank of Brasil, Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brazil

1997 “Transparency and Light,” Municipal Theatre of Bebedouro, SP, Brazil

1997 “Interior”, Caixa Econômica Federal Bank of Bebedouro City, SP,Brazil