Aina Clotas: The Backwards Race

Aina Clotas’s The Backwards Race positions the human body as both evidence and mystery: a physical structure, a vessel of feeling and memory, a place where humanity can still resist reduction into mere duty or function. While her paintings are grounded in figuration and shaped by classical training, Clotas perceives the figure as inseparable from abstraction. Her visual narratives combine rationalism with a touch of absurdity, reflecting a generation caught between societal roles, misinformation, and fears and dreams. Flesh, shadow, gesture, and negative space all become a language through which the rational and irrational move together, allowing the body to speak beyond the merely literal.

A profound shift in Clotas’s practice came after visiting a cadaver dissection lab, an experience that altered her understanding of the body and the ethical intimacy of seeing. Clotas discovered the possibility of connection beyond a lifetime, by the idea that learning from the body could become a continuation of life itself. In response, she began drawing and painting faces, limbs, hands, feet, and partial forms as complete presences in their own right. In works where hands pass a thin line between them, where feet hover beneath a disembodied arm, or where bodies fold into compressed interiors, the fragment is never treated as incomplete. Each piece carries the gravity of the whole.

Clotas’s work also emerges from a contemporary unease: the rise of artificial intelligence and the erosion of truth, along with the growing sense of people are increasingly treated as irrelevant and replaceable. Against this atmosphere, Clotas paints spaces where the human remains essential. Her figures are often curled and almost architectural, waiting or suspended between action and surrender. A body folds into itself against a field of blue and red; a seated figure leans over a table in exhaustion or contemplation; a thread dances through a series of bodiless hands, lively as a conversation. These paintings do not dramatize the body as spectacle. They attend to it as a place of endurance, skin becoming resilience and strength.

For Clotas, oil painting offers a vast sensory alphabet. Texture, pigment, and brushstroke allow her to search for meaning through the act of making itself. She is drawn to the elusive question of relevance: whether an image can still matter, whether painting can still alter perception, whether art can create belonging within an increasingly fractured world. Her paintings suggest that it can. They return again and again to the body as spirit and matter that can surpass the limits of space and time. Clotas positions herself as one knot in a larger fabric of human beings trying to make sense of life: through touch, through looking, and through the fragile and necessary act of making images.