Catarina Diaz is a contemporary artist whose practice merges analogue collage and painting into a single, tactile process. Each work begins with the careful construction of layered fragments, onto which she paints directly, allowing surface, image, and gesture to develop in unison.
Her compositions often feature animals alongside the female form, creating nuanced dialogues between instinct and identity, vulnerability, and quiet strength. These relationships feel intuitive rather than illustrative, suggesting emotional landscapes that unfold gradually. Faces and figures emerge softly from textured grounds, inviting sustained looking rather than immediate resolution.
In an increasingly digital culture, Diaz’s commitment to physical materials feels intentional and grounded. The process of cutting, layering and painting becomes an act of refinement rather than confrontation. Themes of femininity, resilience and transformation are embedded within the structure of the work itself.
An award-winning artist who has exhibited internationally, Diaz continues to build recognition for her distinctive visual language. Her collaboration with Pepita Coffee further extended her practice into a wider cultural setting, demonstrating how her art can inhabit both gallery walls and everyday spaces with equal sensitivity.
Your practice combines analogue collage with painting applied directly onto the layered surface. How did this integrated process first develop?
My process developed gradually through experimentation, and was profoundly shaped by my mentorship with Royal Academician, sculptor and collage artist David Mach. That encounter changed the way I understood materials, surface and the possibilities of layering as a language.
I was first drawn to analogue collage for the way images from disparate sources – each carrying its own history, texture and visual memory – could be reassembled into entirely new emotional atmospheres. There is something almost alchemical about that process: fragments that belong to different worlds beginning to speak to one another.
Oil painting has always been integral to this. I often begin with painted grounds in oil – deep, atmospheric foundations that establish the emotional tone before a single collage element is placed. Sometimes I also paint individual pieces before incorporating them, so they enter the composition already transformed rather than as fixed images.
Once assembled, I continue working across the surface, integrating, dissolving boundaries, using gold oil pigments to draw light toward the elements that carry the most emotional weight: a figure, a botanical edge, the border between darkness and form.
What fascinates me is that the surface never has a single origin. It accumulates the way memory does, not through erasure but through coexistence, where different moments, histories and gestures inhabit the same space simultaneously.
What does painting onto collage allow you to express that working on a blank canvas might not?
A blank canvas asks you to invent everything, whilst a collage surface already has a life of its own. Its resistance shapes the work in unpredictable ways.
My work explores how memory and identity are constructed over time. The act of cutting, layering and assembling images mirrors how experiences accumulate within us: partial, shifting, shaped by absence as much as presence. Fractures remain visible as traces, not flaws, acknowledging the incomplete and sensory nature of memory.
Painting onto an existing surface creates a dialogue rather than a monologue, changing the quality of attention. These surfaces hold a density and layered presence that a painted canvas alone cannot achieve; each piece contains multiple histories that continue to reveal themselves over time, inviting viewers to discover new dimensions with each encounter.
Each surface carries the memory of where it has been. That is what makes a work feel lived rather than simply made.
Animals frequently appear alongside the female form in your work. What draws you to this relationship?
Animals bring a raw, instinctive presence to the work, embodying sensitivity and awareness that align with the emotional landscapes I explore.
When animals appear with female figures, they suggest a dialogue between instinct and identity, vulnerability and strength. They act as guardians, quiet anchors in the composition, never dominating the scene.
Nature in my work is not a backdrop but an active force. Botanical elements and animals carry the weight of healing and transformation. The female figure moves among them as something both wild and deeply interior, guided as much as guiding. This interplay creates a layered emotional atmosphere that invites reflection and resonates on a deeply personal level.
Do the animals function as symbols, companions, or extensions of the female figures within your compositions?
They can be symbols, companions or extensions – depending on the work and the viewer. I deliberately resist fixing their meaning, because once defined, a symbol stops breathing.
What interests me more is recognition. People respond to these pairings in deeply personal ways, as if the animal reflects something private within themselves. I cannot engineer this; it arises from ambiguity and leaves space for the viewer’s own experience.
A work that explains itself exhausts interest quickly. My compositions continue to shift in meaning depending on who is looking and when.
How do you balance intuition with careful refinement in your process?
The early stages are highly intuitive. I respond to fragments, colours and textures, letting the composition emerge through experimentation rather than planning.
As the work develops, the pace slows and becomes more reflective. I refine transitions, adjust tones and work to integrate painted and collaged elements until the surface feels unified rather than assembled.
At this stage I use gold oil pigments, not as decoration, but as a signature element that gives emotional emphasis and infuses the work with a sense of luminosity. Gold draws light to the parts of the composition that carry the most weight: a gesture, a gaze, the place where two surfaces meet and become something new.
The process becomes meditative, more listening than directing. I believe this quality of attention leaves a trace in the finished work. The stillness in these pieces comes from how they are made: slowly, attentively, in response to what the surface asks for.
Your Voyage in Gold series suggests movement and transformation. What kind of journey does this body of work explore?
Voyage in Gold reflects both an inner and a symbolic passage. The works explore transformation, resilience and the emotional landscapes that form through grief, displacement and longing.
The series carries many layers of absence. Not described literally but felt throughout: in the weight of the surfaces, in the figures that emerge from darkness toward light, in the gold that refuses to disappear. Loss has been a quiet constant and so has the determination to continue believing in a vision despite it. That tension between endurance and tenderness is at the heart of this body of work.
The concept is deeply connected to my family history, shaped by forced movement across generations. My great-grandfather was sent into political exile, and it was from that rupture that my family put down roots in Africa. Generations later, the war of independence forced us to leave again. Displacement was not an event in my family’s story. It was the recurring condition of it.
That history continues to resonate in the compositions, not as nostalgia but as a reflection on continuity and the kind of strength that forms precisely because it has no other choice.
A deep sense of saudade runs through everything: the Portuguese feeling that exists somewhere between memory and presence, between what was and what remains. Gold, sea imagery and symbolic figures evoke passages between past and present, between belonging and exile. Within this I weave references to Portuguese maritime exploration alongside the opulence of Rococo ornamentation.
Ultimately, Voyage in Gold is about what endures. Not despite absence but through it, and because of it.
Gold carries its opulence, but in my work it is something deeper: the trace of what survives, the luminous residue of transformation.
In a digital age, what does working with analogue materials mean to you both conceptually and emotionally?
Working with analogue materials is, above all, an act of presence. The physical act of cutting paper, layering surfaces and applying oil paint creates a tactile intimacy that cannot be replicated or accelerated. Every gesture leaves a trace: of time, of touch, of decision. That trace remains embedded in the finished work in ways that are felt even when they cannot be fully explained.
There is also something quietly political about it. We live in a culture that rewards speed, and virtual interaction. Choosing to work slowly, with physical materials that resist and respond, is a way of insisting on depth over immediacy, on presence over production.
A work built through this kind of process carries a different quality of time within it. It has been inhabited. Over time, living with such a piece reveals new layers of meaning – a quality that deepens the connection to the work as days and years pass.
Has recognition influenced the way you approach new work or exhibitions?
Less than people might expect. The studio remains a deeply personal space, and what happens there is not shaped by anything received outside it. Of course, moments of recognition – like the honour of having my work acknowledged by the President of Portugal – are deeply meaningful, but they also create a responsibility to resist repeating what was celebrated and to keep moving toward what is not yet fully understood.
What has genuinely influenced my practice is sustained relationship rather than individual moments of recognition. My long connection with Flux, spanning several years of exhibitions and features, has provided something more valuable than visibility. It has provided continuity: a community that has followed the work as it has evolved rather than encountering it as a single fixed point.
Participating in Women in Art at Zebra One Gallery in Hampstead has offered something equally sustaining. A gathering of powerful female voices, each making work from a place of authentic necessity, each maintaining a distinct visual language. That kind of artistic family shapes how you work in quiet but lasting ways.
Recognition fades. Community endures. And it is community that keeps the work true.
Your collaboration with Pepita Coffee and Fatboy Slim introduced your art to a different audience. What did that experience reveal about how your work connects beyond the gallery space?
What this collaboration confirms, above all, is that the work travels. The visual language I have developed over years of studio practice carries its own atmosphere, regardless of the context in which it appears.
What fascinates me most is not the reach but the response. People who encounter the work in that setting often seek out the originals afterwards. The collaboration functions as a doorway rather than a destination, which is exactly the right relationship between that kind of concept and the core practice.
Placing the work in an everyday environment rather than a traditional gallery setting reveals that art can resonate in many contexts. When people encounter an artwork unexpectedly, perhaps whilst sharing a coffee, the experience can feel immediate and personal in ways that differ from a formal viewing. I enjoy the idea that art can quietly accompany daily life.
For me, this is a natural extension of the work. These compositions explore memory, presence and the emotional textures of lived experience. Some of the most meaningful connections happen in those unguarded moments, when the distance between a person and a work of art quietly disappears.
Are there new themes, materials, or exhibition contexts you are excited to explore?
Thematically, my work is moving into deeper and more intimate territory. Ageing, maturity, longing and the particular kind of solitude that comes with profound loss are beginning to surface in the compositions. These are not new subjects in art, but there is a rawness to how they are entering my work now. There is also a quiet determination running through the new pieces. A refusal to stop. That tension between vulnerability and resolve is becoming central to my next body of work.
Scale is something I am also increasingly drawn to. Larger works change the relationship between the viewer and the surface entirely. You are no longer observing from outside the composition, but standing within its atmosphere, surrounded by the layered world it creates. That shift from contemplation to immersion is something I want to explore further.
I am working with new materials, particularly metal and wood, developing pieces that introduce a sculptural dimension to the practice. These are not departures from the core visual language but extensions of it. The same dialogue between collage, oil painting and gold pigments continues, but now across surfaces and structures that occupy space differently, cast shadows and change as light moves through a room.
The ambition is to create environments rather than objects. Spaces where image, material and architecture enter into conversation, where someone does not simply acquire a work but brings a whole atmosphere into their space. That feels like the natural next chapter for my practise.
You are now represented by Art Belina and Sonia Borrell in London. How do these collaborations expand the reach of your practise?
Working with Art Belina and Sonia Borrell introduces my work to a wider international network of institutions and cultural platforms. Their vision opens new possibilities for my practice to evolve across different contexts, including large-scale installations and the development of intellectual property that allows the concepts within my work to expand into new forms and environments.
My work has already been exhibited and collected in the UK, across Europe, Japan and Dubai. This collaboration is now opening further dialogue with new audiences in China, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia and the United States. Each new cultural context brings a different way of receiving my work, and that fascinates me as much as the reach itself.
London has become my home in this more mature stage of my artistic journey. From here, my work continues to travel internationally whilst remaining rooted in the place where my practice has deepened most profoundly.
What this representation ultimately offers is not just visibility but continuity: the possibility of my work entering spaces where it will be lived with, understood deeply, and valued – not only for what it is today but for how it enriches its environment and continues to become more meaningful over time.
For me, art is ultimately about transformation. How memories, instinct and the weight of lived experience come together to form something quietly powerful. Even through moments of change or uncertainty, the act of making allows what was scattered to gather and become something luminous.
You can currently view Catarina‘s work at Zebra One Gallery in Hamsptead, London zebraonegallery
For more information visit Catarina Diaz’s website and Instagram Catarina_diaz_
