For this special ArtNow Report – France Edition, Adriana Soares’s painting goes
far beyond simply illustrating the visible. She engages in a dialogue with time,
visits the past, and brings back to the present all that history left unsaid. Every
brushstroke carries a reverberation that spans centuries—as if, when dipping
her brush, she’s also diving into history itself.
After traveling to Paris, Adriana returned with more than just visual references.
Like someone breathing in the past, she brought back echoes of Versailles, the
fragrance of forgotten gardens, and the golden scars of an era marked by both
opulence and contradiction.
In her new works, Adriana turns her gaze to figures who once inhabited the
French palatial world, painting Marie Antoinette with the precision of a sensitive
chronicler and the freedom of a passionate artist. For Adriana, Marie Antoinette
emerges as an “iconic and controversial figure,” a “leading representative of
the Rococo style,” an “influencer” with a “strong personality,” evoking both “love
and hate” among the French, forever linked to the Revolution and the guillotine.
In her painting, the queen appears wrapped in a black swan—a visual
metaphor symbolizing both her beauty and tragic destiny, as someone who
was at once an icon of luxury and a victim of execution. The golden background
whispers of French nobility, while the surrounding landscape hints at the
gardens of Versailles—a place where splendor once coexisted with the first
signs of an impending collapse.