By Arsine Mkrtchyan ’28, Game Art, and Mateo Ortiz de la Pena Gomez Urquiza ’27, Game Art
At first glance, the gallery feels soft, almost sweet. Walls washed in pastel pink and powder blue hold what appear to be abstract landscapes: rolling curves, gentle shadows, fields of color. Some visitors pause. Others hesitate. A few turn around and walk out.
Then comes the realization.
They are not landscapes at all—they are bodies.
Currently on view at Sarasota Art Museum, Selina Román: Abstract Corpulence transforms tightly cropped photographs of the artist’s own body into large-scale abstract compositions. Through careful framing and pastel bodysuits, Ringling College Fine Arts faculty member Selina Román turns stomachs, thighs, hips, and backs into studies of line, shape, and color. The result is both intimate and disorienting; a quiet challenge to traditional notions of beauty and femininity.
But perhaps the most fascinating part of the exhibition is not what hangs on the walls—it’s how differently people see it. Sandra Lefever, a staff member at the museum, has observed audiences navigating the space over the past six months. She noted that older and younger women often spend the most time with the work, studying it closely. Others, she observed, step inside briefly before deciding it may not be for them.
One piece in particular became her favorite after hours of looking. At first, she wasn’t sure what she was seeing. Eventually, she recognized it: “It’s her back,” Lefever explained, pointing out the mirrored spine within the composition. That moment of recognition changed everything. “The whole thing reminds me of an iceberg,” she added, suggesting that what viewers first see is only a fraction of the meaning beneath the surface.
Even now, she says, visitors frequently misidentify the body parts. One canvas in the lower right remains “pretty ambiguous… it could be anything.”
The exhibition takes on yet another life through younger viewers. Lefever recalled guiding a group of third graders through the gallery. Many of them interpreted the works as landscapes, drawn especially to the pastel tones they described as “ice cream” colors. Their reactions reveal something essential about abstraction: meaning shifts depending on who is looking.
Organized by Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design, and curated by Rangsook Yoon, senior curator at Sarasota Art Museum, Abstract Corpulence turns the gallery into a space of subtle resistance. By magnifying the body until it becomes unrecognizable, Román invites viewers to reconsider scale, perception, and the politics of size.
As the exhibition approaches its closing in March, one question lingers in the quiet, color-washed room: Is this exhibition about the body or about the way we choose to see it?
Perhaps it is less about identifying what part of the body we are looking at and more about recognizing how our own experiences shape what we see. In the end, the work does not demand a single interpretation. It asks only that we stay long enough to look and to look again.
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