Fidalga Project
Casulo | Bettina Vaz Guimarães | de 20 de maio a 07 de junho de 2013
Metalinguagem Pictórica
by Luiz Telles
Bettina is a fortunate artist. Throughout her career she was able to gather a quite precise written register of her trajectory done by people well connected with the contemporary art scene in Brazil, who were able to express the essence of her artwork. These are the authors of the texts that were published in the book she is now launching at the same time of this present exhibition. I feel privileged to be able to follow my predecessors on this path of documenting her work and chose do so in a less analytical but rather opting for a more emotional approach.
Bettina launched herself into this exhibition with a clear intention of experimenting. Not afraid of making mistakes and not afraid of the hard work. (and she works hard!).
Her recent work seems to need several rooms, continuous and connected, to test the result of her compulsion for painting, her passion for colour. It doesn’t matter now whether the shapes that she is painting are coming from children’s building blocks, ambient stimulus or artists that inhabit her garden of references. The important is that all those things will give her new reasons to paint more.
Of course the discussions about the fragmentation of everyday life are still present, the “domesticity” that Reginaldo Pereira and Katia Canton spoke of, but this time these references are used as an adornment. Remain there her personal repertoire, mentioned by Ricardo Rezende, but in this instance, it is less concerned with its origin, or with the symbolic identification of its codes.
More than anything else, I see here the overflowing pleasure in painting that was pointed out by Fernando Velásquez.
Her will is such that the work has to hatch – even if in a square shape. The use of the cube as a form factor reinforces the evolutionary path of her painting, allowing her to break free from the subject, this long companion of her trajectory, and contributing for a whole new venue of possibilities, literally more abstract.
The colour is dominant and complexity increases to a point that the only alternative is to pull the paint from the confinement of a colourful canvas apposed over a wall. By bringing her paints to the surface of hanged cubic objects inside a cubic room, a pictorial metalinguistic effect arises where cubes are painted in cubes displayed in a room with the same shape.
This element brings a new perspective, almost in the opposite direction of Braque and Picasso. It seems like Bettina always has painted her objects as if she had eyes over each side of it, and now she intends to join all the angles of the various envisioned spaces over a three-dimensional surface of another object. Now, she has flattened layers to let the predominance of colour to be evident.
The grandiloquence of her painting is not just physical anymore, as it has been the case in drawings and many previous works. Now it is something that shows a build-up of internal motivations, purely aesthetic and sensitive driven, almost evangelizing. Get into the colour, she says. Be sucked by the explosion of tonalities, walk around its fragments. Feel its presence.
We did not come here to see the Bettina that meticulously chooses her palette according to the environments that she is exhibiting, showing her “unmistakable green” mentioned by Moacir dos Anjos, nor the artist who builds her drawings over multiple sheets of paper. Here is a visceral Bettina, intoxicated by colour and full of courage to embark on something that she is not sure where it will lead her, but which certainly will leave marks over her trajectory as an artist.
I think the invitation at this moment is for everyone to leave the filters at the door, and look at what is being showed as something new, the egg, even if it is square.
Invitation
Overview of the exhibition Casulo / first room
Overview of the exhibition Casulo / second room
Overview of the exhibition Casulo / second room
Detail of the exhibition Casulo / second room