Miami-based Toronto-born painter Madeleine Gross blurs the line between fantasy and reality. Her work deals with the distorting effects of memory, and how the more we try to recall the past, the fuzzier it becomes. This juxtaposition is both metaphorical and literal, with the shimmering ambiguity of her paintings overlaid with the hard reality of a photograph. 

“How we see the world, compared to how we actually experience it, and these moments that we fantasize about and we replay — they become the kind of moments that define us,” she says. These moments can serve as a betrayal of the past, or perhaps a more idealized reinterpretation. Her paintings often deal with silhouettes of lovers embracing, created either with herself and her own experiences as the reference or films of the 1960s. How one relates to her works is subject to their own state of mind. 

“If you are in love and you see my work, it’s like, gasp,” she says. 

“I find that so many collectors have this strong feeling that they’re seeing something they’ve felt and they’ve experienced. But it’s also kind of heartbeating,” says Gross. “I love when people tell me that these figures kind of look like glass, like they’re so easy to break.”

Though she might take some inspiration from the Miami arts culture and many of her paintings have a beachy quality, none of the imagery itself originates from Florida. Instead, much of the scenery was inspired by Canada. “All of the sunrise and sunset photos were taken in Northern Ontario, three hours from Toronto,” she explains. But like with the romantic figures, one’s own memories shape the art, too. 

“When I first started, it was mostly just abstracting the everyday,” says Gross. “But then as I evolved, I started to abstract all the figures in it. I wanted it to be more about the feeling of the beaches and the cityscapes, the feeling of being there. And I want to abstract all the figures, to detach any sort of identity so that it could be anyone. It could be you. You could think, ‘Oh, I’ve experienced that,’ and they could take you to a nostalgic moment.” 

Gross says she is particularly fascinated by the dynamics of sex and love, “what makes people attracted to each other and stay together, that pull to each other.” But sometimes, it’s even simpler than that: “being sexy and being desired — it’s art.”