Candy Bassas’s images grow out of the body and its surroundings: skin under pressure, the weight of water, the density of forests, the quiet presence of animals. They begin in experiences of isolation and difference, then move into dreamlike states where the world feels slowed, unstable, and uncanny.

Working across painting, printmaking, writing, and music, she lets figures and landscapes shape one another. Her canvases often feel like fragments of a larger story: a gesture, a posture, a fleeting encounter with nature that suggests something continuing beyond the frame. In the Landscapes at Night and Seeking Nature series, she returns to the same emotional place again, never fully arriving there. The incompleteness feels central to the work.

Her figures kneel, sink, lean, or twist into impossible positions. Faces turn away or disappear, bodies seem solid and unstable at once. States of withdrawal, desire for contact, and mental escape appear through posture and physicality of the figures. Certain motifs have built a certain symbolic language throughout her work. Forests and dense vegetation create thresholds, places of cover and opacity. Animal forms, often hybrid or half-seen, bring instinct and myth into the canvas. These images come from her upbringing in nature and from melancholic solitude, but they remain open enough to meet the viewer in different ways.

She starts on raw canvas, building abstract grounds with acrylic or cyanotype before adding bodies, plants, animals, and nocturnal forms in oil and pastel. The earlier layers stay visible, so each painting holds traces of hesitation, revision, and decision. The surface becomes a record of process as much as image. Her practice is shaped by technical training and by sustained attention to classical painting, surrealism, and existential thought. These influences do not appear as direct quotation. They enter through atmosphere, scale, and dislocated gesture. Each painting is also linked to a poem, song, or melody, written by her or borrowed from others, so image and sound move together.