Brisa Noronha: The Bones of the World

Os ossos do mundo [The Bones of the World], Brisa Noronha’s first solo exhibition at Galeria Sé, brings together a brand new group of porcelain sculptures and paintings that dialogue with and complement each other within the exhibition space. Central to the artist’s practice, porcelain sculptures – characterized by their apparent fragility, organic forms and the marks of the artist’s gestures on the material – appear here, for the first time, as a three-dimensional response to, or expression of, her investigations into painting. More than a methodological choice, this process arose from limitations imposed by the pandemic, namely, the artist’s lack of access to the necessary equipment to produce porcelain sculptures. During this time, Noronha turned mainly to painting, where she developed the principles that would define the works that constitute the present exhibition. It is important to highlight that Noronha is an artist whose departure points do not come from pre-conceived ideas or projects. Conversely, her practice relies on intuition and on a constant clash between materials, from where her forms and images emerge, always retaining some sort of ambiguity and refusing unilateral readings. Some of the paintings exhibited in Os ossos do mundo are directly based on the cinematographic universe of Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986), whilst others draw on some of the artist’s personal photographs. In the first case, Noronha selects film stills showing specific frames where the composition of the scene and its props offer the visual material to be re-worked in the paintings. These images go through a process of decantation or reduction, in which the artist keeps only a few selected elements to be transposed and summarized in the pictorial field. Curiously, many of the objects reproduced on the canvas are pots, vases and other domestic utensils, whose forms compose the basic vocabulary of porcelain; a vocabulary that becomes the departure point for the artist’s sculptures. Akin to Eleonore Koch (1926-2018), Brisa Noronha’s pictorial practice comprises landscapes and still lifes. Both artists explore voids and the essence of forms, using sparse compositions that dispense with human figures and narrative content. Nonetheless, whilst in Koch’s work we see a tireless study of colors and contrasts, Noronha’s painting employs a subtle palette, dominated by pale pinks, greys and beiges that are closer to the colors of Morandi (1890-1964). There is undoubtedly something metaphysical in these paintings, and this quality is emphasized in their mysterious titles, extracted from the screen captions that appear on the frames selected from Tarkovsky’s films, constituting, therefore, a readymade operation that adds a dose of humor through the mismatching of images and titles. In Os ossos do mundo, the paintings coexist with the three-dimensional works in a dialogical way, establishing a sort of virtual space or scenography in which the sculptures exist as acting characters. Eggs, nests, pots, candleholders and chapels are some of the recurring motifs in the artist’s sculptural practice and here they reappear in new self-standing arrangements and in a floor piece made of dozens of differently sized pieces (Capela-caverna-tumba e os castiçais de vigília [Chapel-Cave-Tomb and the Vigil Candleholders], 2021). Like in her paintings, Brisa Noronha’s sculptures explore essential forms: the gesture of joining hands that becomes an egg; the semi-elliptical shape that is simultaneously chapel, cave and tomb; and the pot – a basic and universal utensil in the history of our civilization and a fundamental shape in the production of ceramics – which, when inverted, becomes shelter, home, a protected space. These are monochromatic and fragmented works, improbable compositions formed by the sequencing of different parts, in which ideas of collapse and verticality – a primordial feature of sculpture – seem to coexist in constant tension. In contrast to the solidity of materials such as bronze or marble, the artist recurrently works with an inherently fragile material, which she molds by hand in order to obtain organic and elementary forms that bear the marks of her gestures. With their whiteness, fragmentation and scale, these sculptures are reminiscent of objects found in archeological excavations. But not only that; they are works that survey the origins of forms that express some of the most fundamental instincts and impulses of the human species: creation, shelter, death, amongst others. The bones of the world.

OFF THE GRID

Nov 18th 2021 - Dec 24th 2021

Lamb Gallery

Maya Weishof - Headless

Nov 13th 2021 - Dec 18th 2021

Kupfer

Rafa Silvares - Smoked Ham

Smoked Ham is London-based Brazilian painter Rafa Silvares’ first solo exhibition at Peres Projects, Berlin. With extreme precision and craftsmanship, Silvares’ works evade narrative or thematic approaches, focusing instead on the sensorial and synaesthetic properties of painting. Nevertheless, the new group of medium and large scale works on view at Peres Projects forms a coherent pictorial repertoire in which images of industrialised objects, domestic utensils and machinery are depicted in the act of generating some kind of organic by-product. Although the human figure is completely absent from these paintings, it is alluded to both through the choice of objects that favours those which function as extensions of the body (a telephone receiver, a straw, or a takeaway foil wrap) and the range of senses they convey (sound, taste, smell, touch, in addition to vision, surely). Beyond that, there is also the fact that all these objects seem to operate without any human intervention, thus becoming themselves anthropomorphised, or even sentient. The title of the exhibition reflects not only the centrality of the body in these works, but also Silvares’ interest in exploring the multiple associations between verbal and visual language in painting, in a complex semiotic game where word and image are constantly being attached to different referents (the thing itself) to generate open-ended meanings. In this context, the ‘smoked ham’ in the title stands for a very particular type of flesh; not the bloody carnage of Soutine or the pulsating entrails of Adriana Varejão, but something whose pleasantly pink appearance appears almost synthetic and whose texture is at once soft and dense, smoked. In other words, a texture which mirrors the effect sought by Silvares in the painstakingly laboured surfaces of his paintings. The artist speaks of his wish to make things seen ‘as if through a filter’ where objects achieve a cosmetic quality in compositions which are structured as smooth fields of colour gradients, vibrations and contrasts. Figuration, in this sense, is used as a pretext or springboard to work through issues pertaining to the domain of painting rather than a means to fulfil a narrative function. This is not to say that the figures that make it into a composition are gratuitous or random. Rafa Silvares’ works draw on a myriad of references from art history, literature, design, pop culture, and many more; all of which play a part in the construction of his pictorial vocabulary. On the one hand, his work methodology involves collecting images that appeal to him, images of very mundane objects that can be found in any typical middle-class household worldwide and which are devoid of any particular symbolism. In parallel to this, the artist compiles lists of all kinds of stuff that may feed into the paintings: texts, ideas, visual, cultural references, and so forth. This methodology of selective permeability generates a personal repertoire of disparate references that are drawn together by what he describes as a ‘magnetic pull’. The next step involves a series of studies in colour and composition using both analogue drawings and digital software in order to test the different combinations between figure and background, colour contrast, or the general gestalt of each work. Like such artists as German-Brazilian Eleonore Koch and her distant relative Josef Albers, Rafa Silvares devotes a lot of energy to the careful planning of his paintings, privileging the phenomenological aspect over any specific narrative content that the work may convey. Evidently, the purpose is not to claim a return to the modern belief in the autonomy of art (or painting, for that matter). On the contrary, as a ‘post-neo’ artist (as in Neo-Geo, Neo-Expressionism, or painting after ‘the death of painting’ in general), Silvares’ work is absolutely contaminated not only by everyday stuff but also by the multitude of artistic styles and ideas that preceded him and from which he often picks and mixes freely in his works. The painting Ham Parade (2021), for example, takes its title from Picabia’s Love Parade (1917); produced in a period when the artist became fascinated with the idea of machines as pictorial sources and created a series of mechanomorphic works in which industrial objects are invested with human qualities. The central figure in Silvares’ painting is made up of a concoction of different types of metallic bits of machinery and utensils assembled together in the shape of a train that cuts across the composition to divide the pictorial plane horizontally. Contrasting with the great mass of black and white gradients, the artist adds a solid ultramarine blue background on the top of the composition and a vibrant fluo yellow at the bottom. This is complemented by a sweeping, sensuous, and extremely soft red and white gradient that appears as the smoke coming out of the train chimney that extends to the right-hand side of the canvas. In Silvares’ incongruous scenery, however, the smoke has a fleshy (ham-ish) quality; it is some type of weird organic excrescence produced by the machine whose warm, smooth appearance contrasts dramatically with the coldness and hardness of the industrial objects. Like Picabia’s machines, the figure in Ham Parade seems to have acquired anthropomorphic qualities not only due to its mysterious self-functioning mechanism (i.e. a thing that moves without human intervention) but also because it appears to be producing something laden with human feelings of desire, sensuousness, or seductiveness. It is worth noting, however, that Silvares’ interest in machines as pictorial sources does not coincide with early modern ideals of industrialisation as progress. In his works, machines appear rather as signs of a hyper consumerist world on the verge of environmental apocalypse. In the work Smoothsayer (2021), a set of four metal straws are shown sprouting from a juxtaposition of frothy planes in gradients of green, brown and grey against the vibrant red gradient in the background. Again, Silvares looks at a historical precedent for inspiration in the construction of the composition; this time the reference being De Chirico’s use of architectural elements and dramatic shadows in order to create a succession of flat planes in the same picture. The viscous drops placed at the tip of the straws suggest that the object’s function has been somehow subverted: instead of being a tool for consumption of liquids, the straw appears instead to be actually consuming the painting itself. Indeed, Silvares refers to Smoothsayer as a self-consuming painting, bringing to the table ideas around the contemporary status of art as a desirable commodity. In this case, it is the painting that is voraciously consuming its own deliciousness, seduced by its own image and caught in a never-ending narcissist-fetishist loop. More than criticising the financial or speculative aspects of the art world today, Silvares seems to want to get to the bottom of our relationship to art - and to images -, probing what has triggered the centuries-long human impulse to make and experience art. The largest work on view at Smoked Ham is a mural-size triptych titled Late Night Booty Call (2021). The composition traverses the whole extension of the three canvases, starting on the right panel with what looks like a crumpled piece of foil typically used for take-away food that issues a small flame which increasingly grows in size to take up the entire surface of the left panel. The massive yellow and red gradient is rendered in a similar manner as the other organic volumes produced by disparate objects in Silvares’ paintings: soft, sensuous, and above all highly ambiguous. In this particular instance, the gradient can only be read as a flame in relation to the figure, which provides enough contextual information for the viewer to identify it as such. But there is also something highly hedonistic about the volumes that make up this flame; the image becoming suggestive of a pile of luscious human bodies (torsos, buttocks, legs) entangled in an orgy of the senses; adding another possible layer of meaning reinforced by the title. Ultimately, Late Night Booty Call humorously suggests that perhaps the source of all desire - whether to placate a hunger bout by getting a takeaway falafel after a drunken soirée or being hit by an urgent sexual drive in the middle of the night - is, pathetically, the same. But what are those gradient masses that recur in all the paintings presented in this exhibition and what function do they fulfil in the composition? From a technical viewpoint, they are precisely executed, their sleek surface not showing any signs of mark-making that could reveal the artist’s subjectivity. From an art historical perspective, a more obvious correspondence could be made with the work of Brazilian painter Tarsila do Amaral, whose treatment of curvaceous figures as synthetic sculptural volumes (via Léger) loosely resonate with Silvares’ forms. In contrast with the cold and precise quality of the industrial objects in these pictures, the gradient masses are amorphous, uncontrolled substances that invoke the different senses. But not only that. The work Annunciation (2021) takes as its starting point the famous early renaissance altarpiece by Fra Angelico in which the archangel Gabriel is depicted wearing a glorious pale pink robe adorned with golden embroidery. Silvares’ Annunciation is similarly dominated by a pale pink substance that pours out of a meat grinder and seems to spill out of the edges of the canvas. Despite the obviously distinct subject-matter of these paintings, Silvares’ choice to incorporate a traditional religious reference suggests the desire to attribute a transcendental quality to the fleshy discharge in his own painting. Ultimately, it says more about Rafa Silvares’ indefatigable faith in painting’s ability to deeply affect one’s senses and generate a multiplicity of possible meanings that may change over time. Painting as a thing in itself, freed from the obligation to surpass or destroy what came before, or to illustrate current cultural debates, or to represent something.

Katie Van Scherpenberg - PAINTING AS KNOWLEDGE

The impulse to bring art and life together took over artists’ imaginations in several parts of the world in the postwar period, when the modernist principle of autonomy of the artwork gradually started giving way to neo-avant garde practices that sought to engage more directly with the realities of everyday life. In Brazil, this period coincides with the emergence of the neo-concrete movement that produced such notable artworks as Hélio Oiticica’s wearable capes/ sculptures (the Parangolés) and Lygia Clark’s hinged metal objects meant to be manipulated by the viewer (the Bichos). These iconic works, which today seem fully incorporated into the global historiography of art, explicitly collapsed the autonomy of the art object through the participation of the public. While it seems fair to say that neo-concretism is now recognised as one of the key movements in the second half of the 20th century, several other equally groundbreaking practices still remain under the radar. With a career spanning more than 50 years, Katie Van Scherpenberg has developed a very singular, original and consistent body of work in which art and life are inextricably intertwined. This entanglement, however, is not the product of predetermined artistic intentions or strategies, but rather the expression of a life’s work that is characterised by great coherence and determination as well as of a very singular biography. Born in São Paulo to European parents (her father Pieter was a naturalised Dutch citizen from Germany and her mother Mildrid was Norwegian) in 1940, she soon moved to the US, then Canada, finally settling in London, where she lived until 1945. The following year, the family returned to Brazil, where her father was sent on a diplomatic mission to support the arrival of Dutch immigrants into the country. As Van Scherpenberg continued her primary school education in Rio de Janeiro, in 1950 Pieter acquired an island on the delta of the Amazon river, in the remote state of Amapá, where he lived to the end of his days. This was a pivotal event that played a significant part in her work. Her formative years were spent between Brazil and Europe, including frequent visits to her father in the Island of Santana, completing her studies in England, and a two-year scholarship granted by the German government in 1962-64 that allowed her to study sculpture in Munich with Georg Brenninger (1909-1988) and in Salzburg with Oskar Kokoshcka (1816-1986). Van Scherpenberg returned to Rio de Janeiro in 1964 - one week after the military coup that installed a dictatorial regime that would remain in power for the next two decades - and got married a few months later; her only daughter was born the following year. At this point, Van Scherpenberg seemed to be settling into a more conventional career path: she started to show her work in national salons, continued to pursue her art studies, and set up her own studio. But the marriage didn’t last long, and in 1968 she took the radical decision to pack up her bags and move to her father’s place in Amapá with her young child in tow. It is hard to imagine a more sweeping change of circumstances for an artist who had previously experienced a highly cosmopolitan life in Brazil and Europe. Van Scherpenberg’s choice to relocate to a remote Amazonian island shows how the artist inherited her father’s ‘adventurous spirit’, which she claims ‘allowed (her) to become an artist, to live in different countries, withstand affective and financial difficulties, overcome injustices, and keep working’. Pieter was not only an extremely influential figure for the artist but her only immediate relative left in Brazil when he passed away in 1971. One of the earliest paintings included in this exhibition, made the following year, is a small scale work depicting her deceased father lying on a bed, his spectral body bathed by the light of a bedside table lamp in the dark room. Although Van Scherpenberg’s work would change markedly in terms of style over the next decades, this candid and deeply personal painting encapsulates some ideas around erosion, time, and - of course - death that persist throughout her entire artistic trajectory. On and off, 17 years of her life were spent in the Island of Santana on the margins of one of the world’s most magnificent rivers, where the absolute lack of professional art materials drove her to research ways to make natural pigments from soil. Speaking about this period in her life, the artist recounts: ‘You could say that the river was, among other things, so much paint, for it contained a large quantity of pigments (ferrous oxides) from faraway places, and together with this paint it brought me a whole lot of information. In this sense, the river is somewhat like a painting. The Amazon was red, but it could take on any colour at all, depending on the angle in which the light hit its surface, sometimes smooth, other times choppy. But the colour that stayed on was a clayey red. A river is like life, it is never stable by its very nature - particularly the Amazon.’ In one of our conversations, Van Scherpenberg mentioned that, looking in retrospect, working with earth pigments was also a means to connect symbolically with the land. Having grown up in between places, she always felt she did not belong anywhere. With her father gone, and both mother and sister having moved permanently to Europe, the incorporation of the ‘land’ into pictorial plane played an almost ritualistic role in processing her feelings of rootlessness. The matter of painting is central to Katie Van Scherpenberg’s work; the centrality of materials becoming gradually more prominent as her practice matured. By the mid-1970s, when her paintings still focused primarily on the human figure and Brazil was undergoing the so-called ‘Years of Lead’ of the military regime, the artist produced her only openly political series. Titled The Executives (1976), these paintings comprise individual and group portraits of suited white men rendered in a grotesque manner, their distorted faces bearing disdainful smirks and diabolical stares. In these equally satirical and monstrous portraits, Van Scherpenberg manages to brilliantly encapsulate the political climate of that time. Unfortunately, in the past couple of years, the series has achieved renewed resonance - a timelessness - in light of the recent political scenario in Brazil as well as in other parts of the world. Although her later work would move away from any direct allusions to social or political themes, this series gave rise to an interest in exploring geometry and space that developed from studies on perspective for paintings showing groups of politicians standing on podiums. A turning point in Van Scherpenberg’s trajectory was the work The Fall of Icarus (1980), which marked her first incursion into three-dimensional space and the exploration of movement and time. The work comprises five MDF square panels painted in white tempera installed horizontally on a wall covered in black velvet. Each module features a small white plaster object placed on the left hand side of the surface. These panels are identical, except for a black strip that traverses each piece horizontally, placed at the bottom of the first panel and shifting slightly upwards on each iteration. Here the Greek myth is translated into strictly abstract forms, with the tragic fall only tangentially suggested through the visual effect of the horizontal stripes that cut across each square, like a sequence of snapshots of a film strip in motion. According to Curator Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, in The Fall of Icarus the artist articulates for the first time ‘the relationship between the human body, nature, paint, and indifference’. As he points out, the work is devoid of any individual drama; what it shows is a body falling in space or, in Pérez-Barreiro’s words, ‘the drama of nature and time itself’. In the early 1980s, Van Scherpenberg worked on a project commissioned by National Foundation for the Arts (FUNARTE) with the aim of developing good quality art materials for the Brazilian market which involved the analysis of mineral pigments from Brazilian soil that could be used to produce paints. At the time, artists could not access high quality paints due to extortionate tax import duties and lack of interest from Brazilian industries to develop products for this niche market. This not only provided the artist with the opportunity to expand her research on local materials initiated in the Amazon territory, but also opened up new possibilities to explore materiality in her own work. Moreover, from today’s perspective, this was an extremely pioneering project in terms of promoting sustainability and local economic development. Importantly, the 1980s marked the expansion of Van Scherpenberg’s paintings into outdoor spaces. These ephemeral interventions on the landscape - or ‘landscape paintings’, as the artist calls them - consisted of the use of different types of pigments on beaches, gardens, and rivers. Following the introduction of concepts of time and space in The Fall of Icarus - where these ideas still operated on a representational register -, in the new series of outdoor works painting is an actual process which unfolds in time and space. In the first work in the series, made in 1983, the artist placed a frame on the white sand at a beach in the state of Rio de Janeiro, filling its interior with dark pigment to create a window-like grid formed by two rows and two columns of black rectangles; as the pigments were dispersed and absorbed into the ground the image gradually vanished. One of the most remarkable works in the series is Red Garden (1986), where iron oxide pigment covered the open field facing the historical building at Parque Lage School of Visual Arts, in Rio de Janeiro. As the days went by, the grass started to germinate and the green spikes slowly pierced through the red surface, creating a living painting that incorporated the movement of nature and the dissipation of organic pigments. Considered in relation to Western pictorial tradition, Van Scherpenberg’s ‘landscape paintings’ collapse the hierarchical split between human and nature implied in art historical works devoted to this subject. In these works, nature is neither invested with Christian symbolism nor is it represented as something to be tamed and conquered by ‘civilisation’ or as the expression of human subjectivity. Like the Amazon river, which the artist sees as a kind of painting in flux, they undergo natural processes of transformation and entropy that are not subjected to human will; the same processes that are at play in our bodies in spite of our humanity, and which will, at some point, inevitably lead to death. Perhaps this is what Perez-Barreiro means when he speaks of the ‘drama of indifference’ as a central idea in Van Scherpenberg’s work. At about the same time, the artist started experimenting with different pigments and a wide variety of materials on a series of wall works that often incorporated found objects onto the pictorial surface. Exploring the dynamics of the relationship between support and material, she prepared mixtures made with gesso, tempera, sawdust, wax, and other materials onto plywood boards, adding pigments onto the surface to create abstract works in which form and materiality are highlighted. Speaking about this period, Van Scherpenberg stated that these works gave rise to ‘the idea of a succession of forms leading to the unknown, the fundamental, the sacred thing, and finally painting as a road to knowledge.’ Over the years, the artist managed to keep expanding her practice into different directions even at times of great adversity. At the beginning of the 1990s, when the Brazilian economy underwent one of its most severe financial crises, Van Scherpenberg found herself once more without access to proper art materials. This was the beginning of one of her most significant series, Mummy, I promise to be Happy (1990s), in which she used pieces from her own trousseau as canvasses. Soon, other women started to offer her pieces of their own linen, so she amassed a considerable amount of bedsheets and pillow cases to work with. What started from economic need soon acquired a subversive meaning, as the delicately embroidered collection of linen symbolising the domestic role assigned to women in patriarchal society is transformed into a work tool for the painter. While the very materiality of these works certainly conveys this subversive (or political) meaning, the artist’s own intentions in this series are even more ambitious. According to Van Scherpenberg, ‘the themes that arise in my work have always emerged from painting. I’ve never set out to discuss the topic of women, for instance, but rather was moved by the need to discuss the basis of embroidery on linen, a question that brought me quite close to the origins of painting as we know it.’ Among some of the most remarkable works in the series is Portal (1999), a large-scale diptych formed of two vertical panels of embroidered bedsheets onto which the artist applied bronze and copper pigments that oxidise over time. The bright greenish copper stains on the top end of each canvas drip down over the bronze-coloured background, creating organic lines that vertically cross the painting. Through the chemical reactions at play, time and metamorphosis become the matter of painting, in a similar manner to Van Scherpenberg’s outdoor interventions in the landscape. Here, the supposedly feminine object charged with emotional connotations - objects which are meant to be cared for and cherished by women - is treated pragmatically, and without mercy, as the support used by an artist fully devoted to a rigorous and intellectual pursuit of painting. In the 1990s, Katie Van Scherpenberg initiated another key series of works which was also prompted by a personal object: a small painting by Romantic German artist Anselm Feuerbach which had been carried across continents by her family in their many moves from country to country. By the time the painting was bequeathed to the artist, it already showed signs of visible disintegration, its condition somehow reflecting Van Scherpenberg’s awareness of the relationship between landscape and passage as a result of her need to constantly adapt to new realities due to the family’s constant relocations. The painting itself, which depicts the dark silhouettes of a group of trees on a hill against a dramatic sunset or sunrise was of no particular interest to her. In an interview with curator Luis Camillo Osorio, Van Scherpenberg mentions: ‘What I really find interesting is the work of Ludwig Feuerbach, his great-uncle, to whom thought is divested of the importance issuing from the presence of God’, later adding that ‘the feeling for nature in Feuerbach is such that he even admits that the ultimate communion with nature would take place through death.’ In some works in the Feuerbach series, sheets of metal (copper or silver) are applied to the surface of the canvas and the artist uses a variety of reagent solutions (salt, vinegar, or urine) to create different chemical reactions. It would be reductive, however, to interpret these paintings simply as allegories of death, or of the death of painting for that matter. Van Scherpenberg expresses this point very clearly when she says that ‘death is a material thing, and painting, because it is thought and made visible, generates memories, debate, history, culture, roots.’ While it is true that deterioration - even when premeditated as in this case - in her work speaks of the ‘drama of indifference’, the impulse underpinning her indefatigable quest for knowledge seems at times almost Romantic. In the passage below, the artist brilliantly articulates some of the ideas at play in the Feuerbach series: ‘Painting material is impressed by its own passage in time. The artist-spectator would decipher this erosion, a necessary element, and by discovering the link between art and nature, violate the very structure of that which is sacred. In some of the works the changing of matter as it occurs and the cadences of time substitute the manipulation of colours and forms. Colour appears as the material changes into pigment while forms are made as a measurement of time. The paintings try to be a reflection on these passages. Matter, in a final analysis, should no longer be an important part of the work; just the idea and the clarity of the visual symbolism in its insistent demand for communion with the exterior to itself.’ In the 2000s, Van Scherpenberg continued to develop works in the Feuerbach series, this time reproducing the compositional structure of the original painting, which is stencilled onto the canvas to create Amazonian landscapes using tempera and oil paint. These paintings may seem deceptively conventional when we consider the experimentalism that characterises many of her earlier series, but to me they appear as a kind of moment of communion between the highly disparate worlds of Western pictorial tradition and the natural world of the Amazon that have shaped her experience. Few artists in Brazil have engaged so profoundly with the pursuit of knowledge through painting as Katie Van Scherpenberg. In her work, art and life are inseparable, or to put it more precisely by quoting her words during our recent interview: ‘Painting has taught me how to live’.

Let X=X: Alair Gomes and Hudinilson Jr.

Jun 19th 2021 - Jul 17th 2021

Kupfer

Fernanda Feher: The Conflict Between the Eagle and the Serpent

“- You’re not claiming that women are more unhappy than men, are you! - Of course not, I'm only saying that women face an unhappiness which is particularly inevitable and absolutely unnecessary.” Malina, Ingeborg Bachmann The Conflict Between the Eagle and the Snake, the first solo exhibition by Fernanda Feher at Galeria Millan, borrows its title from a new installation of drawings that occupies the center of the upper gallery space. For the past five years, the artist has produced figurative paintings permeated by autobiographical elements that portray female characters amid natural or supernatural landscapes. Feher has a taste for decorative motifs, an eye for the smallest of details and a vibrant, seductive color palette. Her intricate compositions often incorporate cut-outs from books and magazines, pieces of decorative paper, or small objects that protrude beyond the surface of the painting. These characteristics, which have become even more accentuated in recent years, were already present in the series of paintings produced around 2015, in which the artist portrayed friends and acquaintances in their home environments. In these works, we find a gentle atmosphere, analogous perhaps to David Hockney's portraits of affluent individuals in their comfortable California homes in the 1960s. In these works, the artist's interest in carefully reproducing the decorative details of these environments was already clear, with figures accompanied by tropical vegetation and wild animals whose presence brings an unusual feature to these domestic portraits. More recently, Feher's imagery has extrapolated the domestic environment to create a whole personal mythology that spreads through natural landscapes in which female figures and wild animals predominate. In this transition to nature, the vibrant colors remain, and the scenes gain greater complexity and diversity of pictorial elements. From a stylistic point of view, they are reminiscent of the illustrations of celebrated “outsider” artist Henry Darger (1892–1973), whose work uses imagery of childhood innocence to tell stories of fictitious kingdoms and wars in which pre-adolescent children are subjected to disturbing violence. In the fifteen-thousand pages that make up the epic illustrated novel The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, Darger portrays scenes of torture and battle, transgender children and extraordinary beings, mixing nightmare and fairytale. Like Darger, Feher uses imagery that evokes the imagined universe of children's fables, to which she adds narratives and symbols that deflect a first impression captured by the beauty and apparent innocence of these works to deal with the more conflicting aspects that characterize being in the world as a woman and the relationships between human and non-human. In the installation The Conflict Between the Eagle and the Serpent, the artist brings drawing into the space for the first time. To this end, she created a cylindrical structure formed by a series of circular rings that support the drawings on organically cut paper, occupying the entire height of the space like a large tree trunk in a forest. Suspended in the center of the room, the installation forms a kind of hollow column that also resembles the shape of a serpent, forcing visitors to move around it to see the different scenes that make up the work. In one of these scenes we see corals, jellyfish and beings that inhabit the seascape, in others we find forests where monkeys and naked women hang from branches and trapezes amid the fires that float around them; or a naked woman doing a handstand on the flowering grass accompanied by a coati. There is, on the one hand, the suggestion of communion between these female figures and the fauna and flora; on the other hand, it is clear that being in this environment requires superhuman effort, as it takes ingenuity and persistence to circumvent the laws of gravity. In addition to the figures, other objects found in these scenes hint to us that, in the made-up mythology of Fernanda Feher, not everything is idyllic. Bones, scythes and snakes coexist with the colorful mushrooms that seem to have come out of a fairy tale, in what is probably a sign of bad omen; from the hollow eyes of an abandoned skull in the grass sprout blue flowers similar to those desired by Heinrich von Ofterdingen in Novalis' book (1772-1801); the novel that possibly influenced the Western association between the color blue and feelings of sadness. The link between images of female figures and the natural world also appear in the wall drawings on view in the exhibition. Feher’s unique imagery, in which animal character and female nakedness predominate, points to an undetermined time and space and refers to a mythical order whose signs and symbolism are part of a personal repertoire acquired over the years. There is undoubtedly some utopia in the vision of a feminine that merges with nature. The correspondence between these two entities is evident in a series of recent works titled Corpo Semente (2020), in which Feher modeled life-sized female bodies using different types of clay; the association between this element and the feminine being a recurring concept in numerous mythological narratives (Cibele and Gaia, to name only two). In these works, land and woman become one; an idea that is further underlined by the fact that the clay silhouettes of the figures are filled with a variety of plants which are both symbolic and typical of the local flora. For Fernanda Feher, it would be impossible to produce art that is not closely linked to her experience. It is possible to speculate, therefore, that the recent experience of motherhood has contributed to her thinking about the female body as inseparable from nature, something that is essential to the processes of pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding. But not only that. The ability – or power – to generate life, is also related to a greater awareness of the relations between human and non-human, insofar as it demystifies the artificial division between these modes of existing. In other words, pregnancy and birth offer us the possibility to question an idea of hierarchy propagated by Western thought according to which nature is in a lower position to culture and civilization. In this sense, the recent focus of Feher's work turns to what it means to be in the world as a woman or, more precisely, to be in a world structured on patriarchal foundations. Her approach is sometimes optimistic, sometimes pessimistic, but almost always permeated by humor and the suggestion that it is possible to transform our inter- and extra-human relationships. With regard to artistic lineages, I would say that Fernanda Feher's work finds one of its most interesting parallels in someone like Leonora Carrington (1917-2011), with her fascination for animals, the supernatural, the profane, as well as her sense of humor and awareness of a non-human world. In addition to being a painter, the artist was also a talented writer. In one of her main literary works, The Hearing Trumpet, Carrington imagines a post-apocalyptic community ruled by a matriarchy that condones pagan and animal spirits. In this utopian narrative, the feminine is finally freed from the structure imposed by patriarchy that implies, among other imposed hierarchies, the superiority of humans in relation to "beasts" (women and animals) by virtue of reason. The suggestion is that Feher's work starts from an analogous perspective, sharing with Carrington a sense of humor, the appreciation for supernatural and pagan forces, and an understanding of humans as indivisible from nature. Ultimately, it is an alternative worldview to that produced by the patriarchal logic that encompasses state, church and family, assigning subordinate roles to women within these institutions. In Feher's works, several narratives are constructed in a non-linear and non-chronological manner, presenting numerous “narratives within the narrative” that create multiple points of entry for the viewer. Symbolic elements and motifs are repeated within a tableau in which nature is portrayed in detail, with its fascinating colors, inhabited by anonymous, symbolic or historical figures. In the series of works exhibited at Galeria Millan, the artist alludes to two famous female figures in art history. One of them is Cecilia Gallerani, a young woman of noble origin, who had a solid artistic education and was the favorite lover of Ludovico Sforza, one of Leonardo da Vinci's patrons. In Lady with an Ermin (1489-1490), Da Vinci portrayed the young Gallerani with the small animal in her arms, which, according to some art historians, would be a symbol of purity. Other interpretations suggest, however, that the painter chose the ermine because of the decoration as a member of the Order of the Ermine granted to Sforza by Ferdinand I in 1488. Some elements connect this image with Feher's universe: the fifteenth-century avant-garde woman, as well as the correspondence between the human and the animal represented by the ermine figure. Another recognizable figure in this series is the young woman portrayed in Young Woman with Unicorn (1505-1506) by Raphael. This portrait, which is now at Galleria Borghese, in Rome, underwent an extensive restoration process in 1934 when it was transferred from wooden panel to canvas. The first reference to this painting was by Perugino in 1760, more than two centuries after its completion, when it was identified as Saint Catherine of Alexandria. In fact, at that time, the canvas had undergone a series of transformations, with other layers of paint applied over the original that hid the animal and covered the figure's shoulders, and included the image of a palm tree and a wheel that referred to the instrument used in the torture of Saint Catharine. According to the hagiography, Catherine was a princess and scholar, a holy virgin who converted to Christianity at the age of 14, having been tortured and murdered at 18 by the Roman emperor Maxentius. Even after the restoration, there are controversies regarding the identity of the young woman portrayed. Some historians suggest that it is the portrait of Agnolo Doni's wife (also portrayed by Raphael), other theories point to Julia Farnese, lover of Pope Alexander XI Rodrigo Borgia, one of the most polemic figures in the Catholic Church and whose surname has become synonymous with libertinism and nepotism. Among other recurring female characters, there are the jugglers, tightrope walkers and contortionists whose presence evokes the post-maternity reality in which the woman is called upon to perform several tasks simultaneously. Historically, a dynamic has been forged according to which the woman is almost exclusively responsible not only for managing the household but also for maintaining the emotional balance of the family. Although concepts such as mental load and remuneration for domestic work have gained greater visibility in recent years, the reality is that women still perform about two-thirds of all household tasks, according to a report published by the United Nations. This imbalance in the performance of unpaid domestic work has become even more pronounced in the last year, when the pandemic forced families to keep their children at home and a disproportionately larger number of women had to put their careers aside to dedicate themselves to the home and children. Finally, there is yet another topic of interest to Fernanda Feher whose importance cannot be underestimated. In the work's imagery, there are countless images that refer to a variety of pagan spiritual currents of pre-Christian, folk or ethnographic origins. The hanged figure, a classic image in tarot cards traditionally portrayed as male, appears here as a woman, although represented in her classic form, hanging by one ankle from the branch of a living tree. It is a strong image that evokes violence and death, probably originating from the pittura infamante of the Italian Renaissance, a type of defamatory painting used to portray traitors and thieves. However, according to tarot symbolism, the serene countenance of the hanged person suggests that he or she is there by mutual agreement. Furthermore, the fact that it is tied to a living tree means that the letter refers to life, not death. It is above all a letter that carries a positive message, in that it refers to a notion of spiritual growth based on sacrifice in the name of a higher cause. Another reference to this search for a metaphysical dimension of being appears in the image of the figure sitting in a meditation pose, a practice that helps balance external demands and expectations and spiritual advancement. Through these images, Feher expresses a hybrid personal philosophy that seeks ways to overcome human limitations. With regard to the conditions of being in the world as a woman, these limitations are imposed even more deeply, since it is necessary, above all, to overcome the idea that certain social functions naturally belong to the domain of the feminine. In The Conflict Between the Eagle and the Serpent, Fernanda Feher ties together a series of narratives that emerge from personal experience and that, ultimately, relate to an experience shared by generations of women who, at some moment, questioned the supposed natural order of things. In these made-up worlds, matter and spirit, joy and anxiety, a nature that is both welcoming and cruel, reality and utopia come together in a kind of visual account of learning how to reconcile everyday existence with aspirations for the future.

The Women’s Century - Female Perspectives in Brazilian Art

Jun 4th 2021 - Jul 15th 2021

Cecilia Brunson Projects

Alexandre Wagner: Água-viva

Água-viva, primeira exposição de Alexandre Wagner na Galeria Marília Razuk, reúne um conjunto de pinturas que, em um primeiro momento, podem ser percebidas como ramificações contemporâneas de um dos gêneros mais reconhecidos dentro da tradição pictórica: a pintura de paisagem. Embora seja possível identificar uma unidade temática nas vistas de estradas de terra, horizontes e matas apresentadas aqui, essa leitura mais imediata situaria o trabalho dentro da chave de um certo romantismo atávico; a qual, em minha opinião, desvia o foco de outros aspectos que me parecem mais determinantes no trabalho. O modo como a tinta é diluída e aplicada, as diferentes faturas e intensidades encontradas em um mesmo campo pictórico, a paleta cromática que joga com os contrastes entre luz e sombra; tudo isso atesta à importância dada pelo artista aquilo que diz respeito ao fazer da pintura, colocando em segundo plano um compromisso maior com o ilusionismo ou a representação. Em outras palavras, a paisagem funciona como uma espécie de mote para pinturas que, acima de tudo, tratam de problemas relativos à própria pintura. Decididamente pictóricos (malerisch), esses trabalhos coalescem em imagens como que por um breve instante; no momento seguinte, sobressai a cor, a translucidez, as diferentes texturas: a própria matéria da pintura. Essa oscilação constante é uma das características mais marcantes da obra de Wagner; algo que talvez seja possível apenas devido a escala desses trabalhos, que nunca atinge proporções heroicas, limitando-se ao pequeno e ao médio formato e invariavelmente - e até mesmo contra-intuitivamente - verticais. O esfacelamento da imagem, aliado ao tratamento dado a um espaço pictórico de dimensões modestas, confere uma ideia de fragilidade à essas pinturas, situando-as fora de uma vertente histórica da pintura associada a uma masculinidade virtuosa e incisiva que não permite hesitação ou dúvida. Até mesmo nos diferentes ritmos criados pela pincelada expressiva - que poderiam aparecer como índices de assertividade-, prevalece uma certa delicadeza que, em alguns momentos, lembra a graciosidade das paisagens vaporosas de Guignard. Uma figura recorrente em muitas das pinturas que integram a exposição é o círculo, que aparece ora como um sol ora como uma lua no horizonte em trabalhos como Miragem (2019) e Cachalote (2019); outras vezes como misteriosas lanternas alaranjadas nos troncos de uma paisagem alagada em Lanternas (2019); e, ainda, em outros momentos, como pontos luminosos levemente deslocados do centro da composição que acarretam uma completa desestabilização do espaço pictórico. Esse é o caso de Assa-peixe (2019), uma pintura em tons de laranja e verde atravessada de cima à baixo por uma área de cor comprimida por volumes que se estendem em direção ao centro desde os vértices da tela. A imagem produzida poderia ser entendida como a vista aérea de um caminho terra ladeado por morros, exceto pela inclusão de um círculo verde colocado um pouco abaixo do centro da pintura (sol / lua), que quase nos força a perceber o que vemos como um horizonte, ainda que horizonte de uma paisagem indefinida. Esse efeito vertiginoso da “perda do chão” acontece também em pinturas como Cambará (2019), que poderia ser a vista de um céu desde o centro de uma cratera, um horizonte, o reflexo de um sol em uma lagoa observado de cima dessa mesma cratera. Para além de qualquer tipo de representação, a figura do círculo parece funcionar nesses trabalhos como uma espécie de dispositivo que serve para ancorar as composições, na medida em que cria um ponto focal em meio às camadas de pinceladas aquosas que sugerem uma matéria em fluxo, num movimento que vai em direção ao exterior do quadro. Ou seja, esses círculos acabam por criar uma espécie de centro em meio ao movimento de erosão da imagem que predomina nessas pinturas. Como as águas vivas, o conjunto de obras apresentadas nessa exposição parece possuir uma morfologia cambiante; são pinturas em que a paisagem engendra o abismo do espaço e o abismo da imagem. Afastam-se, assim, de uma longa linhagem da pintura de paisagem ocidental que distingue a natureza da cultura, buscando domesticar ou apaziguar a primeira. O trabalho de Alexandre Wagner, pelo contrário, parece querer incorporar o aspecto vivo e em constante mutação dos organismos naturais, rejeitando conteúdos narrativos em favor da realidade da matéria da pintura, ao mesmo tempo sem recorrer às justificativas espirituais ou racionais tradicionalmente associadas às origens da pintura abstrata no ocidente. Como as águas-vivas, são pinturas invertebradas.

Anderson Borba and Alexandre Canonico

SHEROANAWE HAKIHIIWE - 20 IN 2020: LATIN AMERICAN ARTISTS OF THE NEXT DECADE

(Published on 20 IN 2020: LATIN AMERICAN ARTISTS OF THE NEXT DECADE. São Paulo: ACT, 2021) Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe began his artistic career in the 1990s, when he learned to make artisanal paper out of endemic plant fibers from Mexican artist Laura Anderson Barbata. Since 1996, he has been working to recover his community’s oral memory through the publication of artisanal books. In 2000, the publication Shapono, made of abacá paper and pigments extracted from seeds, flowers and wood, won the award for best book from the Centro Nacional del Libro de Venezuela. Though paper is not part of the Yanomami material culture, Sheroanawe adopted this medium to register and preserve his people’s legacy, undertaking a contemporary revision of their cosmogony and imagery. Employing a synthetic visual language characterized by formal rigor, reduced color palette and the serialization of pictorial elements, he creates a kind of ‘archive in process’ of a culture that has been endangered since the arrival of the nape. In face of this erasure, Hakihiiwe’s works constitute acts of resistance by making permanent the patterns used in body painting, by registering the fauna and flora of his surroundings and by retrieving the mythological narratives of his ancestors. In 2010, Sheroanawe held his first solo show at Galeria Oficina #1 in Caracas. Curated by Luis Romero, Õni Thë Pë Komi (All The Drawings Are Finished) featured 33 drawings on artisanal paper that record the body art of his community, a type of work which, like basketry, is done exclusively by women. Displayed on special occasions that bring together visitors from other shaponos, these drawings are ephemeral. These days, as the way of life of the peoples in the region is increasingly under threat, these large Yanomami celebrations have become rarer. As a result, there is a rupture in the continuity of the transmission of knowledge and customs, and the effacement of collective memory, gaps which the artist strives to fill. Sheroanawe tells how he had to turn to his mother to find the words that correspond to the drawings’ titles, as he could no longer recall their names. Another focus of Sheroanawe’s practice is registering the fauna and flora of his territory, underscoring the close relationship between the ecosystem and his people’s way of life. The series Kamie Ya Uriji Pi Jami Parawa Ujame Theperekui Uriji Terimi Thepe Komi Kua (Where I Live in My Jungle and in The Orinoco River Live All These Animals As Well, 2018) is comprised of sets of hundreds of small drawings arranged on a grid, configuring a visual compendium of the fauna that inhabits the Upper Orinoco Basin. Each drawing displays a repetition of seemingly abstract shapes which express, in a synthetic manner, the main attributes of each animal portrayed. Employing the graphic strategies and visual imagery of the Yanomami people, while at the same time appropriating protocols of Western art, Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe’s work escapes traditional dichotomies like abstraction versus figuration and art versus artefact. As such, it asserts its relevance in the current moment of intense revision of the canons of art. Moreover, its relevance in the contemporary world is expressed by the mastery with which it combines formal refinement with the transmission of an epistemology that offers a model of resistance and human survival in the face of imminent environmental collapse imposed by the Western logic of progress. KIKI MAZZUCCHELLI

CAROLINA CAYCEDO: 20 IN 2020: LATIN AMERICAN ARTISTS OF THE NEXT DECADE

(Published on 20 IN 2020: LATIN AMERICAN ARTISTS OF THE NEXT DECADE. São Paulo: ACT, 2021) Carolina Caycedo Over the past decade, Carolina Caycedo has been investigating the exploitation of waterways by governments and large multinational corporations, particularly in Latin America, as well as the catastrophic impact of major hydroelectric infrastructure projects on surrounding communities and ecosystems. Be Dammed (2013-) is an ongoing series that combines drawings, photographs, installations, books, performances, videos and workshops in which the artist seeks to build a “popular historical-environmental memory,” proposing counter-narratives to the dominant ideologies of extractivist capitalism. These works result from an extensive process of research and dialogue with communities directly affected by the construction of hydroelectric plants and specialists in environmental, humanitarian and legal issues. Therefore, while each work in the series functions independently, they make up a kind of ever-expanding constellation. In The Collapsing of a Model (2019), Caycedo looks into the disastrous effects caused by three dams located on the South American continent: Hidroituango, on the Cauca River in Colombia, which since 2018 has been at risk of imminent rupture, and the two tailings dams that devastated the region of Mariana in 2015 and Brumadinho in 2019. In this work, photographic collages on vinyl in monumental dimensions are created from aerial images taken by surveillance satellites, mapping and military technology. Observed from a distance, the images form attractive patterns, resembling large abstract expressionist paintings in shades of green and brown, but as one gets closer, it is possible to distinguish the level of destruction in these territories. Another important series produced as part of Be Dammed is Cosmotarrayas (2016-), consisting of hanging sculptures made of handmade fishing nets and other objects collected in riverside villages. The title of the series is a portmanteau word that combines the terms “cosmos” and “atarraya” (net), attesting to this object’s centrality in these communities’ subsistence and way of life, as well as their relationship of sustainable coexistence with the rivers. An expressive group of Cosmotarrafas (a Portuguese variant of the same title) was exhibited at the São Paulo Biennial in 2016. The nets used in these sculptures were dyed black, red and brown, evoking the coloration of the toxic mud from the Fundão dam that contaminated the Doce River, in southeast Brazil, in 2015. More recently, Caycedo has been incorporating ritualistic objects into these works – small talismans, glass vials containing potions, among others – that invoke non-Western worldviews and spiritual entities linked to healing and the feminine power of nature. Activism and the artistic practice are closely linked in Carolina Caycedo’s work. Still, far from positioning herself as a leader or precursor of the causes she has embraced, the artist works together with individuals and organizations in order to create a variety of experiences in the aesthetic field that ultimately provide points of access to the multiplicity of forces at stake in current environmental and humanitarian conflicts, as well as presenting possible models of resistance. KIKI MAZZUCCHELLI