Jeanine Brito uses her dreamlike paintings to preserve memories and fantasies of 'life before'

There is a slow, lilting song by the 1940s quartet The Ink Spots, in which the group, accompanied by a lonely ukulele, hums and croons, "We three, we're all alone, living in a memory: my echo, my shadow, and me." This is how one might have found Jeanine Brito in 2020: all perception of time had melted away, and she was alone with only a memory for company, painting herself into a lush, shadowy dream sequence.

Like each of us, the artist had been caught in the revolving door of the past two years, looping through a time-warp of hasty reopenings, lockdowns, and a shaky sense of normalcy. It was only one brushstroke at a time that the German-born, Toronto-based painter grounded herself, turning to a practice that became fully realized in the throes of the pandemic.

Brito had been painting off and on for years. She sought a creative outlet to cultivate solely for herself, something that belonged to her apart from her day job as a designer, yet she was frustrated that she didn't have enough time to commit to the kind of discipline she wanted. Then came the storm known as March 2020, and time was suddenly in abundance — so much so that it dragged and blurred. The two hours a day she had spent commuting were now empty, inviting. What else was left to do but paint?

As the days slipped amorphously one into another, Brito says there was little to define the passing of time besides the canvases that were steadily accumulating in her home. "Everything had become so insular and time was becoming more abstract," she says. "Instead, painting marked time for me." The linear work week was gone, and in its place were fragmented memories of "before" — memories that would come to be integral within her perspective as an artist.

Her practice kept her tied to earth with an everyday routine, which alchemized into a visible, tangible timeline of her development as an artist. She began to notice how her paintings and subjects (most often herself) took on new forms as she experimented in composition, scale, and reference. All the while, each painting quietly gained new details, a sharper point of view, a finer hand.

Then another year was gone as we slouched into 2021, and Brito found herself in an abrupt transition into her late twenties. Under lockdown, and with new swathes of time to ruminate on nostalgia, she thought of past pleasures and heartbreaks, of carefree memories she felt were in danger of degrading. It was following this introspective period that she realized these memories were fertile ground for new works, and found a renewed commitment to her artistry.

Lingering feelings and recollections, uprooted by the pandemic's disruptions to daily life, became the paintings that filled her first solo exhibition, August and Other Stories. Rich with the vivid colours of a dream, each work is a retelling of a memory, littered with personal iconography, symbols, and mementos that Brito has mentally collected and tended to.

Brito describes her subject matter as "not a literal translation of a memory," but something more fragmented and surreal. Rather than attempting to perfectly replicate a moment in time, she relishes in theatrics and distortion. "It's as if you took a memory and you were to imagine it as a tableau on a stage," she says. "In a perfect world, what would this memory look like? What would I change about it?"

In a perfect world, what would this memory look like?- Jeanine Brito

Much like the compulsion to preserve a moment in a photograph, the artist feels what she describes as an acute fear that "if I don't paint it, I'm going to forget more and more." Conversely, she worries that the memory will be undone, replaced by what is portrayed in the painting. In dealing with something so ephemeral as a dream or memory, Brito is well aware of how susceptible each is to being warped and tampered with — or how they can slip away entirely.

"It's a natural process that memory becomes distorted. The strongest memories are the ones associated with emotion: you preserve the feeling, but the details slowly fade away."

The uncanniness we have lived with for the past two years — where what we had known and remembered as "normal" now feels like another lifetime — continues to be a surprising mirror for Brito's work. The dreamlike veneer of her paintings, she describes, comes from slight touches of surrealism, "always with something unsettling, or unexpected." A velvet curtain, a gloved disembodied hand: each fills the growing visual language Brito has devised for herself, her experimentations taking her further in a practice that only continues to ripen and bloom.

How can one begin to sift through the debris of what this pandemic has swept into our lives? Perhaps slowly, and piece by piece. It was through painting that Brito came to understand the value in this work, of unraveling the time we are living through now by memorializing what came before.

"I don't know if it's a successful endeavour, but I try to think of it as water slipping through my fingers," she says. "I can try to hold on to it, but it doesn't really work. And in some instances, there is the reclaiming of a memory that is less than ideal and making it into something beautiful. There's satisfaction in the effort of preservation."