Guade Estienne builds a body of work in which the image appears as an unstable territory, suspended between memory, presence and disappearance. Their paintings begin from personal photographic archives, which are transformed through oil, watercolor, veils and blurred surfaces, giving rise to scenes where bodies seem to emerge and dissolve at the same time. In their visual universe, portraiture does not function as a fixed affirmation of identity, but rather as a space of passage: a fragile, mutable form shaped by bonds, affections and memories.
Born in Buenos Aires in 1999, Estienne holds a degree in Visual Arts from the Universidad Nacional de las Artes. Their practice centers on questions of identity, belonging, uprooting and vulnerability, understanding individual experience as part of a collective construction in constant transformation. In 2024, Estienne took part in an academic exchange program at the Universitat Politècnica de València, and between 2023 and 2025 received a scholarship from Taller Gráfica P/A. Estienne is currently part of the MANGLAR Artist Program.
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Their production unfolds mainly between painting and printmaking, with a sensitivity marked by the tension between the intimate and the shared. The images selected from their own archive are translated into painting until they become scenes charged with ambiguity: recognizable figures that lose sharpness, faces that turn into memory, bodies that seem to inhabit a threshold between appearance and absence. Through this process, painting becomes a way of thinking about what remains and what inevitably changes.
Estienne has presented solo exhibitions such as Latidos íntimos at Teatro Círculo Benimaclet in Valencia, and has participated in exhibitions and salons at institutions and spaces including Museo Sívori, Museo Pettoruti, Departamento 112, Casa Nacional del Bicentenario and Casa de la Cultura de Vicente López. In the context of Como por arte de magia, their work engages with the idea of the image as a sensitive artifice: in contrast to a visual culture dominated by immediate sharpness and digital standardization, Estienne proposes a painting where the trick is revealed through the fragility of gesture, matter and the emotional persistence of memory.
