Paris-based artist Carolina Ventura works explores how gestures, forms, and colors meet, mix, and transform. Her artist book More Beautiful Than They Are brings together the drawings she’s been creating almost daily since 2020.

In her drawings, Carolina weaves memories, encounters, and symbols from her inner world with fragments of pop and everyday culture. She’s constantly searching for that charged moment when tension sparks and something unexpected happens—when “magic” appears. She layers gestures and materials, lets colors collide, and connects what doesn’t naturally belong together.

For us, this project began on Instagram. I (Dorothee) had been following Carolina’s work for a while and was especially drawn to her drawings and her fearless use of color. One day, she posted that she was looking for someone to collaborate on a book—one that would gather the drawings she’d made mostly during the COVID lockdown. With limited materials at the time, she had drawn on whatever she could find—letters, invoices, scraps meant to be thrown away. I reached out right away and proposed publishing the book with Präsens Editionen. Luckily, Carolina was immediately on board.

We then brought in Laura Breitschmied to help shape the concept and write the dossiers for potential supporters. The three of us met online and later in Carolina’s apartment in Paris to select the drawings together. Seeing them in person, we realized they weren’t just drawings—they had a physical, almost sculptural presence. The backs often revealed traces of what was on the front or remnants of the paper’s previous life. So we decided to treat both sides equally: page after page, just like flipping through a stack of lived-on paper.

At the beginning and end of the book, macro shots by Dominik Hodel zoom in on the textures and details of Carolina’s work, opening up new ways of looking—and hinting at how endlessly this body of work could continue to unfold.