Sra. D, a.k.a Lara Padilla

The work of Sra. D, a.k.a Lara Padilla, encompasses disciplines such as painting, sculpture, dance, performance and fashion design. Her mostly figurative pieces draw attention to female power representation through the deformation of the body and the use of colour and textures. A vindication of gender exhibited through large hands as powerful instruments of battle or heavy feet, an image of the perseverance of women in their struggle. Sra D. understands art not as a silent showcase but as a path of political action and intervention. Her aesthetic is an ode to diversity, portraying all types of bodies to promote a look of equality and authenticity.

Her performances dialogue face to face with his pictorial and sculptural creation through the similarity between compositions and trajectories. The use of body painting underlines the plastic aspect of his choreographies, while in his urban actions, he insists on this reflection on the construction of identity conceived as belief. However, the female body is not a prison for Sra. D. In her latest creations she has expanded her visual discourse by exploring African and pre-Columbian art, cultural chapters of great social and conceptual significance such as Genesis or the interaction of bodies with new supports and textures.

Lara Padilla

Black Tetris Magnum, 2021

Mixed media on canvas

400 x 300cm

Interview:

What inspires you when creating?

It can be an emotion, an image or a word; inspiration can come from anywhere. It inspires me a lot to travel, take pictures, and know new cultures. I think my painting is very experiential and is almost like a diary.

What are you working on recently?

I'm still working on the "tetrix" series, which I think still has a universe to explore. And in parallel, I am working with various characters in different contexts and with everyday scenes telling other types of stories. I also continue to work with movement and dance.

Tell us about your creative process.

The first thing I address about my creative process is the background of the work. I create a very free colour atmosphere and work with pigments, collage and different techniques to create a fracture in the work. From there, I create the composition that I have in sketch or photography. The case of the "tretix" is ​​much more experimental; I create a character and what I do is play. I fit in all the others and conquer all the space.

Are you participating for the first time in the fair? What do you expect from Art Madrid?

About my participation, what I hope is to be able to show my work, which is what I am most passionate about, with great enthusiasm. Also, meet other artists, nourish me with all that creativity and enjoy the fair.

Lara Padilla

Purple Tetris, 2021

Mixed media on canvas

170 x 170cm

Currently, your artistic expression is not limited to a discipline or a medium. How is Sra. D (not Lara Padilla) projected in the next five years?

Sra. D is projected in the next five years as a more experienced and mature artist. What I really value is the work of every day; I think this is a life career. It's what I do, work every day in the studio. From here, I will always find myself, and I will not be the one to set limits for myself.

Your work is mainly figurative and representative. What do you find in figuration that doesn't give you abstraction?

My work is primarily figurative, although I also have some abstract pieces. But I am fascinated by the human body. I love to explore its limits. I create characters with impossible and disproportionate bodies, very expressive, proposing other models of being a man and a woman, and valuing diversity freedom. I also work with the body as supports on occasions, especially in street performance actions with performance and dance, and I use body painting to tell these stories.

Lara Padilla

Rainbow tangle, 2021

Mixed media on canvas

170 x 170cm

Sra.D, A.K.A Lara Padilla, participates in Art Madrid with the gallery from Barcelona 3 Punts Galeria, together with the artists Alejandro Monge, Gerard Mas, Kiko Miyares, Luis Feo, Rodrigo Romero, Santiago Picatoste and Ramon Surinyac.

The work of Cedric Le Corf (Bühl, Germany, 1985) is situated in a territory of friction, where the archaic impulse of the sacred coexists with a critical sensibility characteristic of contemporary times. His practice is grounded in an anthropological understanding of the origin of art as a foundational gesture: the trace, the mark, the need to inscribe life in the face of the awareness of death.

The artist establishes a complex dialogue with the Spanish Baroque tradition, not through stylistic mimicry, but through the emotional and material intensity that permeates that aesthetic. The theatricality of light, the embodiment of tragedy, and the hybridity of the spiritual and the carnal are translated in his work into a formal exploration, where underlying geometry and embedded matter generate perceptual tension.

In Le Corf’s practice, the threshold between abstraction and figuration is not an opposition but a site of displacement. Spatial construction and color function as emotional tools that destabilize the familiar. An open methodology permeates this process, in which planning coexists with a deliberate loss of control. This allows the work to emerge as a space of silence, withdrawal, and return, where the artist confronts his own interiority.

The Fall. 2025. Oil on canvas.195 × 150 cm.

In your work, a tension can be perceived between devotion and dissidence. How do you negotiate the boundary between the sacred and the profane?

In my work, I feel the need to return to rock art, to the images I carry with me. From the moment prehistoric humans became aware of death, they felt the need to leave a trace—marking a red hand on the cave wall using a stencil, a symbol of vital blood. Paleolithic man, a hunter-gatherer, experienced a mystical feeling in the presence of the animal—a form of spiritual magic and rituals linked to creation. In this way, the cave becomes sacred through the abstract representation of death and life, procreation, the Venus figures… Thus, art is born. In my interpretation, art is sacred by essence, because it reveals humankind as a creator.

Between Dog and Wolf II. 2025. Oil on canvas. 97 × 70 cm.

Traces of the Spanish Baroque tradition can be seen in your work. What do you find in it that remains contemporary today?

Yes, elements of the Spanish Baroque tradition are present in my work. In the history of art, for example, I think of Arab-Andalusian mosaics, in which I find a geometry of forms that feels profoundly contemporary. In Spanish Baroque painting and sculpture, one recurring theme is tragedy: death and the sacred are intensely embodied, whether in religious or profane subjects, in artists such as Zurbarán, Ribera, El Greco, and also Velázquez. I am thinking, for example, of the remarkable equestrian painting of Isabel of France, with its geometry and nuanced portrait that illuminates the painting.

When I think about sculpture, the marvelous polychrome sculptures of Alonso Cano, Juan de Juni, or Pedro de Mena come to mind—works in which green eyes are inlaid, along with ivory teeth, horn fingernails, and eyelashes made of hair. All of this has undoubtedly influenced my sculptural practice, both in its morphological and equestrian dimensions. Personally, in my work I inlay porcelain elements into carved or painted wood.

Between Dog and Wolf I. 2025. Oil on canvas. 97 × 70 cm.

What interests you about that threshold between the recognizable and the abstract?

For me, any representation in painting or sculpture is abstract. What imposes itself is the architectural construction of space, its secret geometry, and the emotion produced by color. It is, in a way, a displacement of the real in order to reach that sensation.

The Anatomical Angel. 2013. Ash wood and porcelain. 90 × 15 × 160 cm.

Your work seems to move between silence, abandonment, and return. What draws you toward these intermediate spaces?

I believe it is by renouncing the imitation of external truth, by refusing to copy it, that I reach truth—whether in painting or in sculpture. It is as if I were looking at myself within my own subject in order to better discover my secret, perhaps.

Justa. 2019. Polychrome oak wood. 240 × 190 × 140 cm.

To what extent do you plan your work, and how much space do you leave for the unexpected—or even for mistakes?

It is true that, on occasions, I completely forget the main idea behind my painting and sculpture. Although I begin a work with very clear ideas—preliminary drawings and sketches, preparatory engravings, and a well-defined intention—I realize that, sometimes, that initial idea gets lost. It is not an accident. In some cases, it has to do with technical difficulties, but nowadays I also accept starting from a very specific idea and, when faced with sculpture, wood, or ceramics, having to work in a different way. I accept that.