BIO
Charlotte Sapene is a Venezuelan artist living and working between Mexico and Nicaragua. Her work grows from a lived experience of displacement and the ongoing attempt to feel at home. She paints narrative landscapes where human figures move through emotional and psychological terrains shaped by memory, distance, and uncertainty.
Her series Kavanayén stems from a formative childhood experience in the Pemón territory of Canaima National Park, where surviving a small plane accident left a lasting awareness of fragility and transformation. Sapene’s work has been featured in Create Magazine, British Vogue, and Revista Mirada Ecléctica, and presented in solo and group exhibitions internationally.
ART STATEMENT
I paint because I don’t fully know where I stand. Displacement isn’t just a theme in my work — it’s the condition I live from. Landscape stops being scenery and turns into a mental space I carry with me, whether I like it or not.
Figures wander through these paintings trying to orient themselves. Sometimes they look calmer than I feel while painting them. I keep making images as a way to stay inside the confusion, testing what belonging might look like without pretending I’ve figured it out.
PRACTICE
My work emerges from migration and the ongoing search for belonging. Landscape becomes less a physical setting and more an emotional territory shaped by memory and movement. Through intuitive painting processes, I create imagined environments where human presence coexists with animals and elements of nature.
Painting allows me to remain close to vulnerability, connection, and the continuous effort to understand how identity is formed through distance, transformation, and the desire to feel located in the world.