Alice Dote and the Intimate Politics of Looking
Origins
Alice Dote makes intimacy visible without making it simple. Born in Fortaleza, Ceará, in 1992, the visual artist and researcher works across oil painting, drawing, and printmaking, developing a figurative language rooted in autobiographical experience. Her subjects move through eroticism and sexuality, memory and mourning, converging in what she describes as images of intimacy. Yet intimacy here is never sealed off from the world. Dote treats it as a contested field in which bodies are watched, desired, remembered, and made public. Her work asks who controls the gaze and what changes when the person traditionally positioned as its object becomes the author of the image. Eroticism becomes less a theme than a procedure: a way of approaching surfaces, fragments, gestures, domestic spaces, and the unstable distance between self and other. See also Cordel Does Not Fit in Drawers: Marina Nabuco on the Living Archive of Instituto Brincante.
The six selected works show how this politics of looking is built through framing. A reclining shirtless figure and a dog share a vivid red sofa, while the composition withholds the completeness of both bodies. A bathroom sink becomes a muted study in grey, brown, reflection, and routine. Two vertical paintings bring the viewer extremely close to torsos, clothing, folds, and exposed skin, turning cropping into a charged form of attention. Elsewhere, a horse's head appears in dense oil paint over an oval copper support, and a suspended fruit extends into a delicate branching structure against a pale field. Across these works, Dote moves between bodily immediacy and quiet objects without treating them as separate worlds. A sink, a garment, an animal, a fruit, or a patch of skin can all carry the pressure of remembrance and desire. See also Isabela Leao and the Porcelain Edge of Feeling.
Public collections
Dote's research into the city expands this intimate vocabulary. Since 2017, through the collective Narrativas Possíveis, she has worked at the intersection of art, urban experience, and visual culture. She holds a master's degree in Sociology from the Federal University of Ceará, where her research examined walking, urban writing, and image-making in downtown Fortaleza. That formation matters because her paintings also behave like records of proximity: they notice how bodies occupy rooms, how objects retain gestures, and how private experience is shaped by larger structures of visibility. Her first institutional solo exhibition, "o nome disso não é fome," was presented at Banco do Nordeste Cultural Fortaleza from November 2025 to February 2026. Its public program extended the work through conversations, performances, collective readings, live drawing sessions, and workshops, opening intimate questions into shared civic space.
In 2026, Dote published her first monograph with Barléu Editora, gathering roughly sixty paintings, drawings, and prints from recent years, alongside a critical essay by Paula Plee. The publication marked an important consolidation of a practice already shaped by movement between Fortaleza, São Paulo, Barcelona, and Rio de Janeiro, as well as by sustained exchanges with artists, institutions, and independent study groups. For CASCA, Alice Dote matters because her work refuses the old opposition between autobiography and social inquiry. The body is personal, but it is also political; memory is private, but it is formed in rooms, streets, relationships, and systems of looking. Her paintings hold that contradiction with unusual tenderness and tension. They bring the viewer close, then make closeness ethically difficult, turning the act of seeing into an encounter with desire, vulnerability, and the limits of what another person's image can disclose.
