The paintings by Cuca Nelles are always a reflection of her own life experience and, as it is born from the depths, she captures with honesty and brazenness universal emotions and concepts such as fear, vulnerability, violence, loneliness, independence, family, play, childhood, gender roles, the challenges of love and heartbreak. This makes her painting powerful and disturbing, visceral and rapturous.
The energy of her colourful brushstrokes and her expressionist and dreamlike style underline the authenticity of her aesthetic proposals, which bleed with the pure life they contain. Drawing and painting thus become a mirror, a diary or a divan. On the canvas, spaces are generated where the story unfolds to tell truths through enigmatic symbols, calls to the everyday and graphic intrusions of multiple references. The use of the pictorial fragment, the written word and the void, reveals the coexistence between the unconscious and the apparent, revealing the slippery magma in which identity develops.
Graduated in Fine Arts from the University of Castilla La Mancha, Cuca Nelles has been awarded prizes in the 10th and 11th Fernando Zóbel Plastic Arts Competition (1998 and 1999), in 2000 and 2005 by the Department of Education and Youth of the Government of Cantabria and in 2006 in the 5th Plastic Arts Prize of the Government of Cantabria. In 2010 her work was showed in the Observatory of the Arts in Arnuero with his individual “Rojo oscuro 162”. In the gallery Juan Silió “A hurtadillas” (2008), “Nos Otros” (2013) and “I’m a rabbit” (2021). In 2015 “Los ojos de los muertos” at Espacio MeBAS (MAS). She has exhibited collectively in exhibitions such as “Veinte miradas desde Cantabria a la violencia de género”, “My name is Esperanza” in the Mercado de la Esperanza, Santander, “Beauty and Sadness”, in the Galería Torreao Nascente da Cordoaria Nacional, Lisbon, and in Industrie und Handelskammer, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. She has participated in SIANOJA, at the Palacio de Albaicín in Noja, in the Festival Miradas de Mujeres at the CASYC in Santander and in the collective of Cantabrian artists “Meaning Making” (2013) at the Cervantes Institute in New York. In 2017, “Blanco Media y carajillo”, Castillo de Argüeso, Reinosa; in 2018 “Las sinsombrero”, Biblioteca Cantral de Cantabria; “Frontera 40” (2020) at Casa del Aguila y de la Parra, Santillana del Mar and “De tal palo tal astilla” (2021) at Sala Mauro Muriedas in Torrelavega. She has also been present at fairs such as Artesantander and Artelisboa. Her work can be found in the Norte Collection of the Government of Cantabria, the Caja Cantabria Collection and the Collection of the General Institute for Women in Cantabria.