Meet the Artist
Zapp Maldonado, a.k.a. Reynaldo Zapp or R.M. Zapp, is a self-taught Brazilian painter, designer, and writer living in Bali, Indonesia. Each of his pseudonyms refers to one of the distinct creative activities he’s engaged in. He sees them as an integral part of himself and as separated and individual personas simultaneously.
Zapp’s art expresses the intense emotional complexities of the human soul through the human form. He explicitly states, “The human figure to me is a doorway to discussing the anatomy of the soul – not the physical aspects of the human condition. When I portray our frail and earthly mortal configuration, by proxy, I am inviting viewers to look into our inner selves. I want them to roam unexplored and sometimes treacherous spaces within the hidden nooks of our beings.”
Contorted bodies and shadowed scenes invite us to explore the intricate depths of psychological affliction, offering a dark and ghoulish ambiance at first glance. A closer examination, though, unveils a sense of playfulness through his conscientious mixing of forms and their protean symbolism.
Inspired deeply by post-war German expressionism and the neo-expressionist movement of the 1980s, then later by the re-discovery of the classic works of Renaissance masters, Zapp oscillates between the technically rigorous, well-defined images of representational patterns and the more visceral, angst-intriguing elements of jarring distortion and vivid exaggeration.
As a result of these centuries-apart movements, Zapp's distinctive style emerges in a series of canvases depicting human figures over black backdrops. He sometimes includes written text within them, a characteristic style akin to Renaissance-era paintings. Other times, he creates images that appear to capture casual snapshots of daily life with a less accurate approach, frequently revealing something odd or unnatural.
Zapp primarily uses acrylic on canvas for painting and charcoal for sketching. He credits this restraint of material experimentation to his lack of formal training. Still, Zapp is content with his conventional forms of expression, seeing them as an initial step towards discovering new ways to explore our most fundamental existential inquests.
He describes his painting process as one that begins with no clear expectation or pre-determined final result but that revelations will then come to him in his dreams, and the outcome will ultimately reveal itself. Zapp strongly believes in the divine qualities of coincidental occurrences, which cause seemingly unrelated concepts or events to combine and merge into a memorable and inescapable experience.
Zapp's paintings are inspired by the simultaneous conflicting conditions of eternity and the brevity of life. He can encapsulate the ephemeral and the enduring, creating art that speaks beyond the presence of time. His dark palette does not rely on superfluous shock value to stun the viewer. Instead, he shows a crude but honest composition that sometimes appears provoking and other times trivial.
In 1997, Zapp lost all of his manuscripts and early works when his home in Bali burned down. Around the same time, Zapp started a family and launched ZAPPdesign – his furniture design brand. These events occurred one after the other and led Zapp’s life in a completely different trajectory. Zapp’s artistic and literary ambitions were put on hold for nearly 20 years until recently, when a personal crisis that resulted in the separation from his family, and an accident that forced him to lay immobile for two months, pushed Zapp’s return to painting and writing.
Today Zapp combines and alternates his art and literature practices to manifest his multi-artistic expressions. “I love creating cerebral worlds by communicating them either through a narrative in writing or forming visual depictions through impactful iconographies.”
The same applies to designing furniture and interiors, where Zapp creates three-dimensional connections between complex mental spaces and structural forms. Today, as in the past, Zapp contends with extreme vibrational shifts due to his relentless creative output – one which undulates between a sometimes hyperactive brain and the intricacies of his often obscured psyche.
“I make art to connect with my ever-shifting mental and emotional conditions through specific periods of distress or bliss and to express pictorially what words cannot convey.”
When not in the studio painting, Zapp can be found writing in his favorite coffee shop in Canggu, a popular area of Bali, or checking the waves for a morning surf session.
