Handsaw

Eduardo Berliner’s paintings question the relationship between memory and experience. His humanistic renderings of plant forms, animals and people are rooted in the slippage between invention and remembrance, often exploring themes of surreal trauma. In Handsaw, Berliner merges an afternoon garden scene with an act of brutal violence: a girl sawing a tortoise. His fascination with the work of Chaïm Soutine led him to source animal carcasses from a local butcher, capturing their petrified forms with intense scrutiny. Working impulsively from an erratic combination of found imagery, his own pictures and three-dimensional objects, the artist seeks to illuminate the unstable interaction between reality and imagination. Berliner was born in Rio de Janeiro, where he continues to live and work.