Sandra Mazzini, Quadrangular forest, 2022, oil on canvas, 140 x 190 cm | 56 x 77 in.
By Luciara Ribeiro1
The dimension of encounter marks this text. A meeting of artistic processes, readings and lives. I met Sandra Mazzini when we were still undergraduate students, trainees in an art education project. At that time, in 2011, our personal and professional relationships were intertwined by our day-to-day interaction, the exchange in the educational process and the enthusiasm of two young art students. We met again at the beginning of last year, virtually, and in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we held virtual calls to recover memories and understand our new processes. Over the course of almost a year and a half, now as two educators in new positions, one as a curator and the other as an artist, we have worked to understand how to build links between our work. We understood that there was something in common that interested us, perhaps a certain curiosity about the possible ways of looking at the field of the arts, about constructing discourses and images, about not canceling out the dimension of life in the face of the absurd world in which we live.
We weren’t in a hurry. Somehow, we knew that this stage was just the beginning of a process and that the result would come at the end of it. We had a few meetings, including virtual meetings, visits to the studio, lunches, trips to exhibitions, and we discussed concepts for the works. The process built up with Sandra Mazzini and her work was one of coming and going, of moving away and getting closer; perhaps that’s why my writing here is marked by affective ways, but that doesn’t disregard the critical nature. I understand that curatorial-research analysis of artistic work requires certain distances; however, they can’t be so long that they prevent us from getting closer.
Landscape politics
Observing the changes in Sandra Mazzini’s work was a step that involved thinking about image theories, creative processes and their reception. Mazzini is an artist who looks to the landscape for ways to flirt with the real and the imaginary. Her process begins with a search for architectural interiors she has never visited. In a tireless search through the digital pages of the internet, she gathers a set of images that will be cut out, reassembled and transferred from the digital canvas to the canvas of the painting. Before that, she adds the elements she feels are missing, usually referring to a variety of vegetation, with plants of all types, sounds and sizes.
The dreamlike landscape, mixing inside and outside, reality and fiction, seems to represent a time suspended and distant from the harsh reality of life. Despite this fictional space, we can’t help but see elements of reality there. We recognize them all and can easily enter them. And in thinking about the landscape as it moves between worlds, I remember one of my great references, the professor and geographer Milton Santos, also one of Brazil’s greatest theorists. Santos, in his book “Metamorphoses of Inhabited Space”, defined landscape as “everything we see, what our vision reaches” and which “can be defined as the domain of the visible, what the eye encompasses”. It is not only made up of volumes, but also of colors, movements, smells, sounds, etc. It’s interesting how he adds the sensations generated in the body when you come into contact with the landscape, which somehow indicates that you have to feel the landscape to make it exist. Obviously, Santos wasn’t talking about the artistic landscape, but the geographical and socio-political landscape. However, it strikes me that something similar also occurs in artistic relationships.
You have to feel the landscape to make it exist, to feel it, to enter it. In Sandra Mazzini’s visual process, landscapes touch us beyond the visible, and there can be sounds, sensations, repulsions. They can invite us to imagine ourselves walking through them, inhabiting them or peering at their details. Perhaps this is also another dimension of affection, a concern for the viewer, for those who will be in front of the screen. Perhaps this gesture of involvement builds reflections of the worlds of the creator and the viewer.
Politics of the real
With her work based on the cut-out, invented and recreated landscape, Sandra Mazzini presents works that reorient the spaces of reality in an intense transit between what is seen, what is imagined and what can be elaborated. Her process begins with the search for images in a world inhabited by them, by occupied interiors that become unoccupied, or vice versa.
She is interested in hybridizing the coexistence of the real and the artificial, and although her landscapes are edited and assembled, they are still constructions of the real. In order to think about Mazzini’s work and the politics built into her images, I turn to Philippe Dubois, a French theorist dedicated to thinking about the field of images, especially photographic images. In his famous essay “The Photographic Act”, Dubois provokes us by concluding that every creation starts from a trace of reality, even those that are imagined. Reality is our starting point, it is what we know and where we can identify with.
In her process, Sandra Mazzini uses entangled relationships between photography, imagination and painting. If photography once aspired to the canons of painting, today the two are connected in a line that is not very distant and that is often tensioned or amalgamated. Sandra Mazzini’s work starts from the photographic image, but is not limited to it, because it is in painting that it is formed and becomes effective. Painting is her marker of reality, she is the provider of existence. These are places she doesn’t know and has never been to. But perhaps, in her eagerness to be there, she takes them for herself as an image. It’s a theft of the landscape available in the digital world, but also a selection of those she wants to connect with. These are invented landscapes that become real when they are painted, when they become another element inhabiting this world and time. It’s a work of dedication and exhaustion and, in a gesture of sharing, we can add new layers here with our perceptions.
The paths cross, but they don’t close
In the same way, between the meetings between the researcher and the artist, between the studio and the exhibition room, in this period we have extended our distances and reactivated the memories of a decade since that first internship experience. Each canvas also materializes the tireless hours spent in the studio, the countless brushstrokes and the conversations encountered, which are part of the negotiation with a total and shared process. This is how Sandra Mazzini’s work and our encounters become affective.
- Luciara Ribeiro is a curator. ↩︎