No Fixed Point

Elsa Basil is a Latin American contemporary painter working between figuration and abstraction. She has no interest in painting a thing so it resembles the thing. She takes what she sees apart and rebuilds it as feeling.

She was born in Costa Rica and raised in Managua, the daughter of the Argentine painter Ricardo Correa and the Palestinian-Nicaraguan poet Suad Marcos. She learned color at her father's side and is otherwise self-taught. Painting and language were in the house from the beginning.

She was born Elsa Correa Marcos. Travelling with her mother to Belén, she recovered Basil, a name that had been lost to her bloodline, and took it as her own. She went to a territory she had never inhabited and came back with something that belonged to her. It is the name she signs her paintings with.

Music came first. She has written and recorded her own songs since 1994, across three albums, and her songwriting has always been testimony: violence, migration, ecology, justice, love. In 2003 the same urgency found the canvas. She paints what the voice cannot reach and sings what color cannot say alone.

She works in large format from her studio in Miami, a city that has already entered the work.