Female Portraits: Looking Back to the Past
2023
Fortitude (2023) is a contemporary artwork by Séfora Camazano from the series Female Portraits: Looking Back to the Past. The portrait begins with the story of Gabriela, a Bolivian woman who has had to rebuild her life across different stages and countries. The work approaches fortitude not as the absence of vulnerability, but as the ability to continue, protect and construct a different reality after experiences that have left a profound mark.
Medium
Mixed media — photography, digital painting and hand-painted intervention.
Giclée Fine Art print on canvas with conservation finish.
Dimensions
70 × 50 cm
Year
2023
Series
Female Portraits: Looking Back to the Past
The protagonist
Gabriela was born in Bolivia and moved to the Netherlands at the age of eleven, when her mother left the country with her two daughters to remove them from a family environment marked by abuse.
Years later, while living in Spain, Gabriela again faced gender-based violence. Her trajectory therefore crosses different countries and several periods of reconstruction, making the idea of beginning again a recurring experience in her life.
Fortitude does not represent the absence of fragility, but the capacity to rebuild an identity that is not defined by what came before.
Gabriela
In the work, her story is a point of departure, not the limit of the representation. Séfora Camazano deliberately shifts attention from the experience of violence towards Gabriela's contemporary presence: a woman whose identity extends beyond the events that form part of her past.
Fortitude is therefore built around the tension between memory and continuity. The portrait acknowledges what has been lived without making it the visual centre of the figure, placing Gabriela within a broader narrative of identity, displacement and reconstruction.
Gabriela during the creation of Fortitude · Valencia, 2023
The meaning behind the title
In Fortitude, strength does not appear as something external or heroic. It lies in the ability to preserve one's own identity against what, over the years, has attempted to condition, contain or place it somewhere it did not choose to be.
That tension runs through the entire work: an apparently contained figure charged with an energy that ultimately exceeds its own boundaries. Gabriela's fortitude does not need to impose itself; it is present in the gaze, the pose and an inner intensity that the image makes visible.
Fortitude speaks of what may be contained for a time, but cannot be erased.
Keys to reading the work
01 · The gathered hair
The hairstyle reinterprets Sorolla's original figure, but also evokes what attempts to gather, limit and place us somewhere we did not choose to be — a tension present at different moments in Gabriela's life.
02 · The gaze and pose
The direct gaze concentrates the presence of the work. The hand-on-hip pose, only partially suggested beyond the frame, reinforces the same quiet statement: after everything she has lived through, Gabriela is still standing.
03 · The red
The intense red of the clothing concentrates the energy of the figure. It does not represent external conflict, but a force that appears to come from within Gabriela.
04 · The brushstrokes
Red brushstrokes leave the garment and enter the grey background, almost like flames emanating from the body. The force is no longer contained within the figure and begins to occupy the space around her.
05 · Calm and fire
The visual intensity of the portrait contrasts with Gabriela herself, a calm and composed woman. The distance between the person and the image suggests that strength does not always need to make itself visible.
06 · The yellow rose
The yellow rose appears almost unexpectedly within the red. It introduces something natural and everyday, like a small opening towards the real Gabriela who exists beyond the construction of the portrait.
Curatorial reading
Fortitude is built around a constant visual tension between what contains and what expands. The gathered hair, the frontal presence of the figure and the tightly constructed portrait coexist with an energy that appears to exceed those limits.
That energy is concentrated in the red of the clothing and in the brushstrokes that cross into the grey background, like an extension of Gabriela's own body. Painting ceases merely to describe a figure and begins to make visible an inner force that also occupies the surrounding space.
The contrast is particularly significant because Gabriela, in person, is calm and composed. The work does not attempt to reproduce her character literally, but to reveal another dimension of her: an intensity that does not always manifest itself outwardly.
The yellow rose introduces an interruption within that construction. Natural and unexpected, it acts almost as a trace of the woman who exists outside the painting, briefly breaking the solemnity of the image.
Within Female Portraits: Looking Back to the Past, Fortitude transforms a biographical experience into an image of presence: contained in form, yet difficult to contain in energy.
Artistic reference
Like the other works in Female Portraits: Looking Back to the Past , Fortitude begins with a composition by Joaquín Sorolla and retains several of its recognisable elements, including the construction of the figure, the pose and the hairstyle.
The reference does not function as reproduction, but as displacement. Séfora preserves a structure inherited from historical painting and transforms it by introducing a contemporary woman with an identity of her own.
This change of protagonist also alters the reading of the image. What belonged to another time is reactivated in the present, establishing a visual continuity between the portrait tradition and the experiences of the women represented in the series.
María in a Red Blouse
Joaquín Sorolla · 1910
Creative process
Fortitude begins with Gabriela's story and a historical composition reinterpreted from the present. The photographic session produced an image that was subsequently transformed through composition and digital painting.
The finished work combines photography, digital painting, Giclée Fine Art printing on canvas and hand-painted intervention, integrating Gabriela's presence within a contemporary pictorial language.
Fortitude in the artist's studio · Valencia
Exhibition history
The Westin Valencia
Valencia, Spain · 2023
Botanical Garden of the University of Valencia
Valencia, Spain · 2024
Former Town Hall of Bétera
Bétera, Spain · 2024
Galerie Portraits
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