RUNA (aka Rute Norte)
Winner Challenge
2023
aka Rute Norte
Portugal · Lisbon
Painting · Artist-Traveller · Abstraction · Memory · Place
RUNA, artistic name of Rute Norte, is a Portuguese artist born and based in Lisbon.
Her practice combines painting, photography, writing and travel, developing around the relationship between lived experience, place and memory.
She received her Master's degree in Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon in 2022. Her Master's thesis, The experience of place: its influence on the pictorial production of the artist-traveller, in the 21st century, established the figure of the artist-traveller as a central field of her theoretical and artistic research.
Her education also includes a three-year Painting course at the National Society of Fine Arts in Lisbon and studies in photography at Cenjor, the Professional Training Center for Journalists.
RUNA has developed an extensive practice of independent travel, including bicycle journeys through different parts of the world. These experiences are documented through photography and written travel chronicles and subsequently transformed through painting.
Her exhibition career extends over more than two decades. She has participated in more than thirty solo and collective exhibitions in Portugal and internationally, including Milan Design Week 2021. Her work is represented in the Lisbon City Council collection and in private collections in Portugal, Spain, Belgium, Brazil and Japan. Her recent research has moved towards large-format canvases, oil painting and increasingly material surfaces, incorporating impasto and relief into a pictorial language situated between abstraction and emerging figuration.
CURATORIAL TEXT
WHAT REMAINS OF A PLACE
NNC Gallery London Project — Curatorial Department
What does an artist bring back from a journey?
A photograph can preserve an image.
A text can reconstruct an event.
But memory performs a different operation.
It forgets.
It selects.
It exaggerates.
It combines moments that never occurred together.
RUNA's painting begins within this unstable territory.
Her definition as an artist-traveller is particularly important because travel in her work is neither exotic decoration nor a catalogue of distant landscapes.
It is a method of knowledge.
Her journeys are experienced physically. She travels independently, including by bicycle, observes places from within their duration and subsequently works across three languages: writing, photography and painting.
Each produces a different relationship with reality.
Photography says: this existed.
Writing says: this happened.
Painting asks: what remains?
This distinction gives RUNA's work its particular strength.
Once an experience reaches the canvas, documentary accuracy becomes irrelevant.
The external place encounters an internal one.
A landscape may survive as colour. An episode may become gesture. A sensation can emerge as texture without revealing the event that originally produced it.
The journey therefore continues long after geographical movement has ended.
Her Master's research at the University of Lisbon formalised precisely this relationship between the experience of place and the pictorial production of the artist-traveller.
But theory does not imprison the paintings.
Quite the opposite.
RUNA's visual language embraces instability.
Spontaneous brushstrokes coexist with calculated structures. Geometry encounters improvisation. Transparency meets impasto. Abstraction allows fragments of figuration to surface before absorbing them again.
Her recent interest in large-format canvases and relief makes this process increasingly physical.
Memory acquires matter.
Painting acquires weight.
And the surface itself becomes another kind of territory.
This may ultimately be the most compelling way to understand RUNA's practice.
She does not paint the places through which she travels.
She paints the distance between experiencing a place and remembering it.
That distance is never fixed.
Like every journey, it changes the moment we cross it.
The Experience of Place
For RUNA, painting can be understood as a form of diary — but one in which memory is not required to remain faithful to facts.
A journey, an encounter, a meal, an animal, a landscape or an apparently insignificant episode from everyday life can become the origin of a painting.
Her practice develops through what she describes as a trimedial relationship between text, photography and painting.
During her travels, photography records and writing narrates. Both remain connected to an experience that physically occurred in a particular place and time.
Painting begins where documentation ends.
Once an experience enters the pictorial space, reality is free to change.
Memory selects.
Emotion distorts.
Imagination reconstructs.
The exterior world intersects with the interior one.
RUNA consequently works within a territory that is simultaneously real and invented, crossing the boundaries between different visual and narrative languages.
Her paintings are predominantly abstract, although figurative elements have progressively entered her work. Powerful gestures, colour, unconscious drawing and improvisation coexist with calculated composition.
There is no requirement for stylistic uniformity.
For RUNA, experience itself provides continuity.
Her work becomes a journey through the external world and, simultaneously, through an internal landscape shaped by memory, perception and imagination.
ARTIST-TRAVELLER: FROM PLACE TO PAINTING
Travel in RUNA's practice is not simply a subject.
It is a method of artistic research.
Her Master's research formally investigated the influence of the experience of place on the pictorial production of the contemporary artist-traveller, giving theoretical structure to something that had already characterised her life and artistic practice.
RUNA travels, observes, photographs and writes.
Later, painting transforms these experiences.
The passage between these languages creates different degrees of distance from reality. Photography maintains a physical trace of the encountered world. Writing reconstructs experience through narrative. Painting moves further, allowing memory and imagination to reorganise what happened.
Her recent work has also introduced a stronger investigation of materiality.
Large-format canvases, impasto and relief effects make the painted surface increasingly physical. At the same time, her transition from acrylic towards oil introduces a slower working process and contributes to a denser pictorial universe.
Opposing visual conditions coexist throughout this research:
abstraction and figuration, spontaneity and calculation, geometry and gesture, transparency and impasto, flatness and relief.
Her interests extend from personal experience, mortality and the ephemerality of life to questions of social and environmental sustainability. Musical references occasionally enter the paintings as another means of establishing rhythm, intensity or introspection.
Rather than imposing a unified visual formula, RUNA allows these elements to coexist.
The journey continues inside the painting.
WHY COLLECT RUNA
RUNA represents an interesting position for collectors seeking artists whose work combines an established practice with continuing formal and conceptual experimentation.
Her trajectory extends over more than two decades and combines sustained artistic production, academic research and an extensive exhibition history.
Particularly significant is the coherence between her lived experience and her artistic research.
The idea of the artist-traveller is not a retrospective label attached to her work. It is a subject she has investigated both practically and academically, culminating in her Master's thesis at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon.
This gives her practice an identifiable conceptual foundation.
At the same time, her work continues to evolve.
Her movement towards larger formats, oil painting, impasto and relief demonstrates an artist who is not simply repeating an established visual formula but continuing to test the physical and expressive possibilities of painting.
Her professional history provides additional context for collectors: more than thirty exhibitions, participation in Milan Design Week, representation in the Lisbon City Council collection and works held in private collections across Europe, Brazil and Japan.
For new collectors, RUNA's work offers several possible points of entry: colour and gesture at an immediate visual level; travel and memory at a narrative level; and questions surrounding place, perception and the transformation of experience at a conceptual level.
Collecting RUNA means collecting not simply an image of a place, but what remains of that place after it has passed through experience, memory and painting.
As with every acquisition of contemporary art, collecting should begin with a genuine connection to the artwork. Future financial or market value can never be guaranteed.
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