Paula Scavazzini, Monuntain, 2022, oil on canvas, 168 x 276 cm | 61.4 x 102.3 in.What to do if at the age of thirty, suddenly, while turning a corner,
you are overcome by a feeling of ecstasy — absolute ecstasy! —
as if you had suddenly swallowed the late afternoon sun
and it burned inside your chest, radiating sparks to every particle,
to each end of your body?
Katherine Mansfield
In the lively and pulsating dialogue that emerges from the three artists’ artworks – Giulia Bianchi, Paula Scavazzini and Mirela Cabral – we come across the short story “Bliss” by Katherine Mansfield, written in 1918, whose translation to brazilian portuguese was called “Ecstasy”. The short story reveals the state of enigma and perplexity that the character Bertha Young experiences, and brings out the dimension of the act of creation itself as a way of doing something with the excess that permeates her. Bertha experiences ecstasy that alters her perception and makes her feel, in her own body, the vibrating nature of everything. Her world experience is intensified and expanded, gains new and enigmatic depth, her senses copulate and open up unlikely cracks in the image.
This abysmal and feminine point of view at vertigo affection is the guiding thread of this presented exhibition. The meeting of these artists opened to the unexpected, viscerality and overflow reveal, in the abyss of their gestures, a path to invention. In the face of the ineffable and unspeakable, painting becomes, in distinct and singular ways, the place where astonishment is transfigured into amazement.
Giulia Bianchi shelters this unfathomable dimension of existence and the invitation to drift, through a sensitive intuition that traverses the immanence of things and presences. Drawing has been present in her life since childhood and, even today, it is an axis from which her way of thinking derives, a source of possibilities, a place of discoveries that leads her to the field of painting. Painting is then forged as a territory of consent to delirium, the invention of other worlds and cartographies. In her gestures, a magical and hallucinatory aspect permeates the canvas as an intensification of reality, a stumbling upon the strangeness of things that sensually engages the gaze. The field of vision also becomes sensitive, tactile, in the pure presence of a sensual atmosphere with different drifts and sinuosities. This is where her research on food also originates. This intensity is revealed in her own words: “When I started painting, my inspiration was in everyday life, including objects and inanimate elements. However, it was in food that I found more flavor, a wealth of senses to be explored, a more intense pictorial expression, amplified by vibrant colors. It’s curious, because when I look at an artichoke, for example, I immediately think of a painting. However, during the pictorial creation process, I focus on bringing the artichoke back: flavor, texture, aroma.”
In addition to simply mimicking the appearance of things, Giulia seeks to access the invisible sheltered in sensation and thickness, as in painting in which the soft texture of butter creates folds that goes beyond mere pictorial representation, proposing a transfiguration that subverts the senses into an “exercise of presence” that is her fundamental imprint. In this movement of accessing something invisible, the artist delves into the thickness of the world and its presences: fish, pumpkins, artichokes or any other presence are enlivened by the decisive gesture of transfiguration of the visible.
The vigorous – and at the same time subtle – clash of materialities and shapes also occurs when oil meets canvas, in contrast to the use of chalk pastels. In the alternation between figuration and abstraction, each chromatic choice creates the opportunity for a new language. The result is a complex visual dialogue in which nuances and core textures are revealed, in a kind of trance in which each layer of color intensifies and opens at random, interacting in infinite movements between rigor and emotion. The color palettes that emerged in this explosion do not have a direct and immediate relationship with reality, but convey a subjective and erotic interpretation of a world in which the contours are direct and there is a kind of blurring of boundaries.
Paula Scavazzini has also been linked to drawing and painting since she was very young and, in the conceptual field, her practice has been developed over the years. We can locate procedural aspects that reveal themselves based on preconceived images from some perspective – from the history of art, architecture, decoration, films and photographs used as reference – or, in a curiously opposite way, with the construction of the painting based on internal images that emerge more intuitively. Floral paintings arise from a relationship with landscape and abstraction, and bring to the scene the tremor of the body and the instinctual dimension through the brushstroke, in the gesture that slides and leaves traces like a dance in infinity, forged in the attraction for contrasts and visual forces. diverse. The artist reveals part of her process: “The scarlet red, the cobalt blue, the emerald green, in contrast with the infinity of whites, pinks and yellows, create chromatic dissonances that interest me. Part of my research is based on certain Italian Renaissance paintings that, in addition to being part of a general Western artistic repertoire, attract me precisely because of their palette and high chromatic contrasts. However, his figurations tend to follow more rigid and rectilinear visual patterns, opposed to my sinuous and organic way of painting, developed and practiced through a series of floral paintings. My interest is not in figuration, but in the power of pictorial gestures that the anatomies and architecture of a flower can give to painting, in addition to the almost infinite palette of colors.”
This fascination is the starting point for the artist to explore various issues in more depth, such as proportions and different chromatic aspects. She is interested in portraits, decorative objects, flowers and multiple landscapes that, in her work, touch on a dreamlike dimension and the “underside of representation”, as a singular perception of the thing in an indomitable presence. The dimension of the detail is made present through expressive brushstrokes, but there is, above all, a pictorial body that hovers between the ethereal and the palpable, the volatile and the imperative. In the course of her gestures, colors and textures, she does not paint remains of the worlds but, above all, what she saw and what she saw: what she is capable of remembering, imagining and imaging in the space between the hand and the eye.
In Mirela Cabral’s artwork, painting appears as a structuring craft in her relationship with the world. Her precious description reveals a lot about her making: “It’s as if I were finding the thing. I enter a meditative state that guides me on what I should or shouldn’t do. Of course there are starting points like places I’ve been, observation drawings I make and photographs. However, I need to give up what I previously know to reach a different place that provides me with the necessary visual insights for the artwork. What appears then is ecstasy as some nameless sensation in which I feel completely shaken, without being able to describe what I felt: something mysterious, without a name, but which can be revealed in an image in an unexpected way during the painting process.”
Thus, Mirela ends up announcing the indices of a relationship in which something overflows and, at the same time, is supported by forms such as handrails and flowerbeds. In his work there is a combination of rigor with lightness, density with volatility. Her artwork is closer to a sensitive field than pure narrative representation. The experience of painting itself is the source of a meaning that, untimely, disrupts agreements and coincidences. Her artworks bring density to the pictorial event that reveals its own logic of constitution and making.
A force propagates and enhances the visual force in the articulated surface. Her artist’s gesture does not hierarchize colors and presences, but summons a poetic place with such density and leads us through a particular world of references and visual repertoire. The presences in her paintings can evoke multiple sensations such as the noise of colors in the air, silence, a shadow or anything that makes us wake up from a state of dormancy and gives us back the clairvoyant and sensitive vertigo, the magnificent thing about being alive.
From the acute dialogue that arises from the encounter of these young and promising artists and their artworks, we are summoned to the buzz and noise of ecstasy: essence and form, color and content, sensation and gaze, a sensual profusion – as delicate as fierce – of relationships that arise from the plastic exuberance of each one. In the mysterious network of things and accidents, art emerges as a unique means of dealing with that which always escapes, a way of transmuting and including that which agitates and disturbs, the volatile, the dramatic, the overflowing experience that we call ecstasy and that reverberates.
The finesse of this encounter and the splendor of the presence of things was described in the attentive and burning intensity of the poet Sophia de Mello Breyner, who enlightens us as follows: “The oldest thing I remember is a room facing the sea inside the on which a huge red apple was sitting on a table. From the brightness of the sea and the red of the apple rose an irrefutable happiness, naked and entire. It was nothing fantastic, it was nothing imaginary, it was the very presence of the real that I discovered.”
