Somersaulting

Jungle Vision Expression
Style: Jungleistic
Mixed media on canvas
Original size: 48″ W × 60″ H

Somersaulting feels like witnessing an underwater world suddenly awakened by movement. Forms seem to leap, turn, plunge, and reappear at different depths, creating the sensation of living creatures performing spontaneous somersaults through water. Yet nothing is completely defined. The painting gives us the exhilaration of their movement while leaving their identities to the imagination.

The composition is built through extraordinary variations of blue—from luminous turquoise, aqua, and crystalline cyan to cerulean, cobalt, deep blue, and blue-violet. Soft passages of green and yellow-green introduce an almost phosphorescent glow, while touches of pink, red, and warm reddish brown appear unexpectedly within the cooler field. White and very pale blue catch along the edges of the gestures, creating flashes that resemble light fractured through moving water.

What makes the painting especially compelling is its sense of different levels of depth. Some forms appear close to the surface, brilliant and sharply illuminated; others seem suspended farther below, partially obscured by layers of blue. Still deeper passages become darker and more mysterious. The eye is continually carried between these levels, as though following something that dives out of sight only to appear somewhere else.

The brushwork itself seems to perform the somersaults. Long gestures rise and curl before folding downward; narrow strokes dart between larger forms; arcs suddenly change direction. Where these movements cross, the surrounding light seems to splinter into luminous fragments. Movement creates the light, and the light reveals another layer of movement.

There is something magical and joyful within Somersaulting. It suggests a hidden aquatic world in which fish or other unknown creatures move freely through crystalline depths, turning the water around them into flashes of color and light. But the painting never completely reveals them. We are left with their traces—the plunge, the turn, the flash, the disappearance—and the feeling that beneath every visible layer, another world is still moving.

As a Jungle Vision Expression, Somersaulting embodies the Jungleistic style of Bereniche Aguiar—where instinct comes alive through movement, color & form.