The Female Image and Gender Violence between Photography and Painting in Graça Craidy’s Until Death Do Us Part

Abstract

This article examines Graça Craidy’s series Até que a morte nos separe (2014), produced from images of crimes against women located by the artist through Google searches. Based on available documentation, the study reconstructs the circulation of these source images and analyzes their reworking in acrylic painting, considering framing, bodily position, color, brushwork, figure-ground relations, materiality, and modes of presentation. The discussion articulates photography and document, the ethics of visuality, relations between photography and painting, and curatorial ekphrasis. It proposes two operative notions: pictorial reactivation, through which the source image reappears within another material, chromatic, and temporal regime without implying reparation of violence; and visual resistance, produced by visible brushwork, antinaturalistic color, scale, and unstable contours. Analysis of four pairs shows that Craidy preserves recognizable poses and framings while altering the conditions of appearance, expanding the ethical-political field of reception through interactions among photography, painting, statistics, language, and spectatorship practices.