Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: Ilana Savdie paints as if the body were a battlefield where a cellular insurrection and a hallucinatory carnival simultaneously take place. In her monumental canvases, flesh no longer knows its boundaries, organs migrate, limbs dissolve in tides of vivid pink and electric green, while microscopic parasites become the protagonists of a cosmic drama. This artist, born in 1986 in Miami and raised between Colombia and Florida, does not simply produce paintings: she constructs visual ecosystems where violence and seduction, the intimate and the political, the organic and the synthetic coexist in unbearable tension.
Savdie’s work is rooted in a particular experience of metamorphosis, one that runs through Latin American literature like an obsessive guiding thread. When observing her compositions, it is impossible not to evoke the universe of Gabriel García Márquez, this tutelary figure from Barranquilla, the city where the artist spent her childhood. Magical realism, this aesthetic where the supernatural infiltrates the everyday without causing astonishment, finds a striking plastic translation in Savdie’s paintings. The bodies she represents undergo transformations reminiscent of García Márquez’s characters: they do not just change, they simultaneously become multiple states of being, refusing the binary logic that demands that something be either one or the other.
But Savdie pushes this logic of metamorphosis far beyond the South American territory. Her figures also evoke Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, this foundational text where Gregor Samsa wakes up transformed into vermin. In both cases, bodily transformation becomes a metaphor for social alienation, for the experience of a body judged inappropriate, inconvenient, monstrous. Savdie, as a queer woman of Lebanese, Jewish, Venezuelan, and Colombian origin, intimately knows this experience of the body perceived as problematic by power structures. Her paintings do not depict metamorphosis as a punctual event but as a permanent state of instability. The body in Savdie’s work is always in the process of becoming something else, never fixed, never reassuring in its stability.
This instability finds its most accomplished expression in the artist’s use of parasites as a recurring motif. The orange larvae slithering through Pinching the Frenulum or the technicolor worms of Helminth are not mere biological ornaments: they embody a philosophy of infiltration and change. The parasite, in Savdie’s imagination, is not the vile profiteer condemned by bourgeois morality but an agent of transformation that forces its host to evolve, to reconfigure. This fascination with organisms that defy established categories joins a long literary tradition exploring the boundaries of life, from science fiction to writings on the cyborg, including contemporary theories on hybrid bodies.
Savdie’s work also dialogues with an art history that she mistreats, cuts up, and reassembles according to her own carnivalesque logic. Her references to the Baroque are not mere erudite citations: they constitute a strategy of violent appropriation. In The Enablers, the artist draws inspiration from Rubens’ Massacre of the Innocents, the 1611 composition where bodies intertwine in a tragic choreography [1]. In Rubens, the entanglement of flesh serves to depict the horror of a collective infanticide, the State violence exerted on the most vulnerable. Savdie retains this compositional structure where bodies lose their individuality to form a convulsive organic mass, but removes the religious pathos to replace it with radical ambiguity.
This relationship to the Baroque extends to Francisco de Goya, whose work haunts several of Savdie’s paintings. In Baths of Synovia, she reinterprets the etching “Aguarda que te unten” from the Los Caprichos series, where a goblin and a one-eyed woman hold down a goat trying to fly away. In Goya, this scene belongs to a universe of witchcraft and superstition that the Spanish painter ridiculed in his critique of betrayed Enlightenment. Savdie retains the strangeness of the scene, its muted violence, but transposes it into a register where metamorphosis is no longer a curse but a possibility, where the distorting body is no longer a victim but the agent of its own reconfiguration.
This reinterpretation of Baroque masters is not a mere stylistic exercise. It reveals how Savdie uses art history as an arsenal in an aesthetic war against visual hierarchies. By blending Rubens with TikTok screenshots, Goya with microscopic photographs of parasites, she practices what one might call a collapse of temporalities. High Art and popular culture, scientific imagery and Colombian folklore, all are placed on the same plane, crushed in a horizontality that rejects the verticality of the taste judgment.
Savdie’s paintings use colors that assault the eye: candy pinks, neon greens, acid yellows, electric blues. This palette, which the artist claims derives from her childhood in Barranquilla and her exposure to the Carnival, functions as a visual trap. It first seduces the gaze by its exuberance, its chromatic generosity, before gradually revealing the unease flowing from these compositions. Savdie herself said: “The excess of color resembles a seductive subversion” [2]. This seduction constitutes a tactic, a means to lead the viewer to look at what they would prefer to avoid: the fragility of bodies, their porosity, their perpetual threat of dissolution.
The Barranquilla carnival occupies a central place in Savdie’s aesthetic genealogy. This celebration, the second largest carnival in the world after Rio, represents a temporary inversion of social order, a moment when hierarchies collapse and the grotesque becomes king. The figure of the Marimonda, the half-monkey half-elephant masked character with a phallic nose, has haunted Savdie’s work since childhood. Created by the popular classes to mock oppressive elites, the Marimonda embodies resistance through derision, the subversive power of bodily exaggeration. Savdie declared: “I loved this concept of exaggeration of the body as a form of mockery and of mockery as a form of protest” [3].
This carnivalesque dimension is not about picturesque folklore. It constitutes a radical political proposition: what if the body refused the categories imposed on it? What if, instead of conforming to the norms of gender, race, and class, it metamorphosed constantly, thus escaping attempts at classification and control? Savdie’s paintings propose exactly that: bodies that flee, overflow, and contaminate their environment with their own substance. They are never where they are expected, never stable in their identity.
Savdie’s painting technique reinforces this ontological instability. She works with successive layers of acrylic, oil, and beeswax, creating surfaces that oscillate between membranous transparency and reptilian opacity. The wax, in particular, produces textures that simultaneously evoke skin, scales, and internal organs. This unsettling materiality shifts the painting toward the body itself: one no longer simply looks at a representation but is confronted with a fleshly presence that breathes, seeps, and pulses.
In Radical Contractions, her 2023 exhibition at the Whitney Museum, Savdie pushed this logic to its extreme. The title itself plays on polysemy: radical contractions are both the diaphragm spasms caused by laughter, the convulsions of pain, and political movements of resistance. This ambivalence runs throughout the exhibition, where each painting seems to vibrate with an internal tension ready to explode. The works directly anticipated what would become the obvious reality of the current American political climate with Donald Trump’s second term: the abortion ban, the multiplication of anti-LGBTQIA+ laws, and endemic gun violence. Faced with these systemic oppressions, Savdie offers not lamentation but a violent aesthetic response.
This violence is notably expressed in the way Savdie treats portals or black holes that appear in several recent paintings. These circular openings function as passages between dimensions, cartoonish escapes allowing figures to disappear from one side of the canvas and reappear elsewhere. They recall the portable holes of Looney Tunes, absurd devices that defy the laws of physics. But for Savdie, these portals acquire a political dimension: they represent the possibility to escape control structures, cross forbidden borders, and evade surveillance.
The artist constructs her compositions from a complex process combining drawing, digital collage, and painting. She begins with largely figurative black ink sketches, which she scans and manipulates on computer. These digital sketches, where she integrates elements from her image bank, become the starting point for the paintings. But once on the canvas, everything can change. Savdie lets the paint and wax melt and travel on the surface, creating unexpected forms to which she must respond. This dialogue between intention and chance, between control and surrender, produces the tension that electrifies her works.
The reference to Tsukioka Yoshitoshi’s Japanese prints in her recent paintings adds a new layer of complexity. These 19th-century engravings depicting samurai warriors in heroic postures provide Savdie a visual vocabulary to question masculinity, power, and glorified violence. But again, she subverts these images from their original context: the warriors dissolve, their armor blends with insect shells, their supposed heroism crumbles in the acid of fluorescent colors.
In Ectopia, her 2024 exhibition at White Cube Paris, Savdie delved deeper into this reflection on the hero and the spectacle of war. The medical term “ectopia” refers to an organ or part of the body positioned abnormally [4]. This is precisely what Savdie’s paintings do: they place everything in the wrong place, creating a feeling of productive unease. Eyes appear where mouths should be, limbs emerge from unlikely orifices, interiors become exteriors. This impossible topography of the body reflects the experience of those whose bodies are constantly judged as out of place, inappropriate, and thus ectopic by dominant norms.
Savdie’s use of the language of horror and comedy is particularly interesting. These two genres, seemingly opposed, share the same narrative structure: they place characters in situations where the body escapes control, where it becomes unpredictable, embarrassing, threatening. For Savdie, this loss of control is not presented as tragic but as liberating. When the body refuses to obey social injunctions, when it overflows, flees, and transforms, it opens new possibilities for existence.
This opening of possibilities runs throughout Savdie’s work like an underground force line. Her paintings do not offer resolution, do not sketch a comforting utopia. They keep the viewer in a state of productive discomfort, stuck between attraction and repulsion, familiarity and strangeness. This uncomfortable position is precisely what the artist seeks to produce, because it is in this in-between space that something can move, certainties can waver, and new configurations can emerge.
This is what Savdie offers us: not a naive celebration of difference, nor a moralizing denunciation of oppression, but a complex, contradictory, jubilant, and terrifying vision of a world where bodies refuse to stay still. In her paintings, flesh becomes political, color becomes resistance, metamorphosis becomes an act of survival. And we, the viewers, are invited to inhabit this dizzying space where nothing ever remains stable, where everything can at any moment tip into its opposite, where parasite and host, predator and prey, oppressor and oppressed exchange their roles in an endless dance. It is uncomfortable, disturbing, and necessary. It is exactly what we need.
- Peter Paul Rubens, The Massacre of the Innocents, 1611-1612, oil on panel, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto
- Jasmine Wahi, “Euphoric and Grotesque: Ilana Savdie on Painting Parasites,” Interview Magazine, December 22, 2021
- Apple Podcasts, “Ilana Savdie,” podcast, episode aired in 2023, podcasts.apple.com, re-listened in October 2025
- Moran Sheleg, “Ilana Savdie’s Shadow Body,” essay for the Ectopia exhibition, White Cube Paris, 2024
