Giulia Bianchi, Heart, 2023. Oil on canvas,155 x 205 cm | 59.5 x 82 in.
A visceral and enigmatic short story by celebrated writer Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), published in Brazil by Antofágica, with images of works by Giulia Bianchi, is the starting point for Bliss, a group show by Giulia Bianchi, Mirela Cabral and Paula Scavazzini that Janaina Torres Galeria opens on October 28 in São Paulo.
Based on the short story of the same name (Bliss), the most acclaimed by the New Zealand author, an icon of modern literature, and curated by Bia Coutinho Dias, the exhibition features nine paintings and six drawings, a lively and pulsating dialog that emerges from the work of the three artists – an “abyssal and feminine look at vertiginous affection”, where the act of creation is a way of accounting for the intensity and excess they experience, in the midst of a vibrant nature that permeates everything.
“In the meeting of artists open to the unforeseen, viscerality and overflow reveal, in the abyss of gesture, a path to invention,” points out Bia Coutinho Dias, in the curatorial text. “Faced with the ineffable and unspeakable, painting becomes, in distinct and unique ways, the place where astonishment is transfigured into wonder.”
A poetics of ecstasy – “absolute ecstasy”, as Mansfield describes it – thus unfolds in Giulia Bianchi’s canvases, in which painting is forged “as a territory of consent with delirium”, in which gestures imbue the works with a magical and hallucinatory aspect, intensifying the real. An expressive intensity that manifests itself, in addition to oil paintings, in chalk drawings on paper, revealing, as in Immobile and Florida or Bertha Young (the character in Bliss), female figures in a state of suspension.
The power of gesture, establishing a particular relationship with the world, makes up Mirela Cabral’s pictorial universe: flashes of imagery that evoke multiple sensations, such as the noise of colors in the air, silence, a shadow or “anything that wakes us up from a state of numbness and gives us back the clairvoyant and sensitive vertigo, the magnificence of being alive”.
The fascination and vertigo of an experience “in which the senses copulate and open improbable gaps in the image”, as Bia Coutinho Dias describes it, permeate Paula Scavazzini’s canvases, in which expressive brushstrokes give the works a dreamlike dimension, producing “a pictorial body that hangs between the ethereal and the impalpable, the volatile and the imperative”.
Êxtase thus presents, in the works of three young and promising artists who share the same generational pathos, a profusion of shapes, colors and sensations, updating the fundamentals of modern and contemporary painting and reiterating the power of art to deal with what always escapes us, but which suddenly swallows us up like the late afternoon sun, burning inside the chest, “radiating sparks to every particle, every extremity” of the body, in the words of Katherine Mansfield.
Bliss – Giulia Bianchi, Mirela Cabral and Paula Scavazzini
Curated by Bia Coutinho Dias
Opening 28/10, 11am to 5pm
Until 27.01.2024
Janaina Torres Gallery
427 Vitorino Carmilo Street
Barra Funda, São Paulo-SP
Opening hours:
Tuesday to Friday: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Saturdays: 10am to 4pm
