Carnival Masks and Wrestling Moves Collide in Ilana Savdie’s Chromatic Mayhem
A Colombian carnival’s riotous colors and the theatricality of wrestling matches might seem worlds apart, but Ilana Savdie fuses them in her electrifying canvases. Raised in Barranquilla, where carnival masks mock the powerful and parade-goers revel in spectacle, Savdie channels this spirit into paintings that blur the lines between high art and pop culture.
Her process is a visual collision: screenshots of horror films, Baroque sculptures, and digital memes all find their way into her image archive, only to be flattened and reimagined in fluorescent chaos. The result is a world where masks—both literal and metaphorical—speak to the performance of identity, especially within queer communities, where visibility and concealment often intertwine.
In her exhibition “Ectopia,” fragments of armor, crustacean shells, and swirling color fields evoke both protection and vulnerability, order and disorder. Savdie’s work thrives in this liminal zone, where the familiar becomes strange and the strange, oddly inviting—a dance of contradictions that never quite settles.
#ContemporaryArt #CarnivalCulture #QueerArt #Culture
