Susana Cereja (Mafra, 1992). Susana Cereja's journey begins with architecture, but she always remembers how she used to draw and to paint during her childhood. She studied architecture from 2011 to 2016 in Lisbon, Portugal, and during a small period in Germany. While taking her degree in Architecture, at the same time, she studied Illustration and Drawing at the Faculty of Fine Arts, also in Lisbon, and started working as an architect in the studio of a renowned Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos, where she worked for five years. She also studied printmaking in Barcelona; Arraiolos in Lisbon and in Arraiolos Village; and Drawing at Ar.co - Center for Art and Visual Communication, in Lisbon.
Her artistic project became public in 2017 when she started to share it on social networks and on her website. Susana's project communicates through three main techniques: engraving, Arraiolos tapestry and plaster.
There are several artistic references: in drawing, Pablo Picasso and Paula Rego; in the use of color, Henry Matisse and David Hockney; in the engraving, Nancy Spero; in the tapestry, Anni Albers.
Highlight for the group exhibition at the Delphian Gallery, London, UK; as well as the individual exhibition “Cherriful”, in the Algarve, Portugal both in 2018; and her most recent and first solo exhibition in Lisbon, Portugal “Unfolding - A creative process trail”, from 4 November 2020 to 26 February 2021 – in addition to being part of the Portugal Manual network, which makes her involved in several projects such as going to London Craft Week and other design and art fairs.
"Society doesn’t know how to deal with and work on its emotions."
Probably because she came from an architecture background, Susana Cereja is passionate about the beauty of the materials and likes to take them out of context and to innovate with them, placing them on a contemporary level.
She loves to put her whole soul into her works and to make a difference with the message she conveys and/or techniques she constantly innovates with, wether it’s through mixture, context or use - something that mainly happens in the Arraiolos tapestries (an ancestral Portuguese technique, which the artist works on a daily basis).
Her work is "emotion". The artist works and studies this subject because she feels that we are educated in so many subjects other than emotions. For this reason, the artist likes to talk about the deepest emotions and anxieties of the human being. The Woman theme is also very present in her work, once again through emotion but also with the purpose of breaking paradigms.
The artist is at the peak of her exploration of matter and ideas, not only due to the materialization of a new collection of tapestries, but at the mixture of the three techniques that most fascinate her and which she works daily: engraving, tapestry and plaster.