To call Florencia Troisi’s work stylistically consistent is an understatement. The overwhelming majority of the objects in her shop in Córdoba capital feature the same expressionless female, her large, dark eyes staring out at the viewer. To hear the 32-year-old artist tell it, the choice of her favoured subject came about quite naturally.
“I have always drawn people, and mostly women. And the big eyes – look at my eyes,” she says, pointing towards her almond-shaped browns, the irises so dark it’s hard to tell where they end and where the pupils begin. “In my family we are seven women, and we all look like this.”
Troisi trained mostly in her hometown of Córdoba, and at first glance, the artwork and handmade objects in her shop appear to be exclusively for children. Numerous small square paintings – in a basic palette of kindergarten colours – hang on the walls. Dolls of varying sizes lie in a white metal-framed crib in the corner. Mobiles of papier-mâché seahorses and shiny stars dangle from the beams above. And loosely arranged around the edges of the shop floor are child-sized tables and chairs, all hand-painted in Troisi’s kid-friendly manner. Between the diversity of objects, the uniformity of style, and the cuteness of everything, one could easily mistake the display for one dedicated to a popular Saturday-morning cartoon character.
But a second look reveals a much less facile side to this small shop, called Circo Negro (Black Circus) because, as Troisi says of her work, “it’s for kids, but there’s something dark about it.” Dark is one way of describing those staring black orbs that appear in even the most ebullient of Troisi’s creations; unsettling is another. The outsized unblinking eyes on the faces of boys, girls, animals, and the recurring young woman, hint at a depth behind the overtly kitsch appearance.
A few larger works in acrylic, watercolour, and pencil on canvas are distributed around Circo Negro’s walls without title, warning, or pretension, and they merit further consideration. In one, the large-eyed woman lies on her side, her body strewn with flowers. She appears to be shrouded and buried (though her eyes are wide open). A small tree sprouts from the left side of her body, through the black surface above it, and up into the dark-blue sky.
“I like the aesthetic of death,” Troisi explains, sounding nothing like a person who makes children’s toys and furnishings. “It is much more prevalent in other Latin American cultures than it is in Argentina.”
Among the Latin American artists she admires, Troisi includes Frida Kahlo and Argentine Carlos Alonso. Though nothing in her oeuvre is quite so aggressive as, say, Alonso’s “Manos Anonimas” series, the expressionism that characterises his and Kahlo’s work is readily apparent in Troisi’s pieces as well. The young Córdobesa also draws upon the examples of Viennese artist Gustav Klimt and his protégé Egon Schiele in her painting, and their obsession with the human figure has clearly encouraged her tendency to focus on her own recurrent female subject.
Troisi often dispatches her subjects onto the canvas in an informal manner, and only occasionally do they do they sit comfortably in the centre of the frame. Many are left to languish at the edges, often wrapped in a dark aura that messily gives way to a null, white void.
In the last year, demand for Troisi’s work has increased dramatically, and her rise parallels that of the neighbourhood where Circo Negro is located. Back in 2003, when she first opened up shop, Córdoba’s Paseo de las Artes was a small weekly feria where a few artisans and antiquarians gathered to sell their wares. Circo Negro was hidden at the back of what was then the only shopping gallery in Barrio Güemes, Paseo Colonial. Since then, four similar galleries have opened in the area, and the weekly market has become a much bigger scene, with throngs of shoppers descending on the barrio’s closed-off streets every Saturday and Sunday evening.
This past December, Circo Negro moved into a space on the neighbourhood’s main drag, Calle Belgrano. What initially felt like a gamble to Troisi – moving into a space four times the size of her original shop – paid off quickly. In the first full day of pre-Christmas sales, the take covered the first month’s rent. In her new space, Troisi now sells pieces by a few other artisans, and she is also churning out her own products faster than ever before.
Every object is a handmade original, and Troisi still does all the design work herself, drawing in pencil directly onto the surfaces of objects, but she has now enlisted one of her sisters to help execute some of those designs. And like so many of Argentina’s small businesses, Circo Negro has become a family affair: Troisi’s boyfriend assists her in making her wooden pieces, and her mother and youngest sister have taken charge of the shop’s sales.
Along with her business, the growth of Troisi’s artistic reputation seems set to continue. She completed her first large-scale public artwork this past March, a mural for the event space at Córdoba’s Provincial Commission and Archive for Memory, and she has already been commissioned to do another major piece for a restaurant.
And most recently, Troisi’s work began receiving that sincerest form of flattery: imitation. At one of the feria’s stalls, less than a block away from Circo Negro, someone has begun selling knockoffs of Troisi’s unmistakable style. They look about as much like the original works as a ten-dollar Prada bag looks like the real thing. Troisi is circumspect, however. “What are you going to do?” she shrugs, picking up her paintbrush.
For more on Florencia’s work, visit http://florenciatroisi.blogspot.com/