Niura Bellavinha: Fluidos e Fixos [Fluid and Fixed]
from
November 17, 2009 to January 9, 2010
tuesday - friday, from 10 AM to 7 PM
saturday, from 11 AM to 5 PM
free admission
In 1990, Niura Bellavinha was
preparing her first solo show, Humano Imerso [Immersed Human], at Galeria
Subdistrito, in São Paulo. She stretched a canvas directly on the wall of her
studio, applied pigments and paints to it, and then sprayed it with compressed
air and water. The force of the spray infiltrated the color to the other side of
the canvas. Afterward, the artist was surprised to find that this process, which
took days to complete, had also left marks on the wall. Interested in this
unexpected vestige, she managed to remove that section of the wall in order to
bring it to the exhibition, but during transport it broke apart.
This was the starting point for a type of painting based on fluids and liquids,
with time and color fields as supports. Now this production reveals further
directions in the exhibition Fluidos e Fixos [Fluid and Fixed]. These new
paintings reinforce the artist’s program of research, investigating pictorial
possibilities based on what the artist calls paintings/films, paintings/photos,
paintings/installations, paintings/urban interferences, paintings/performances,
and even some works that use fluids directly from nature.
In 1993, the artist made a painting with rain, in Belo Horizonte. Through the
window on the second floor of her studio, she saw the signs of an impending
storm. With the help of an assistant, she set up a canvas in a vertical position,
and using a broom as a brush, she put paint along the top, leaving some spaces
blank. When the rain began, it started to make the painting, with some
interferences by the artist. The rain stopped, the canvas partially dried, and
then Niura took it back into the studio to use as the basis for a work in oil
paint. She has since gone on to produce works in a similar vein, using
waterfalls, rain, storms, winds, clouds, tides and reflecting pools as the
impetus for artworks that seek to construct an unlikely stability based on the
uncertainty of existence.
Your production is marked by fluidity, the liquid state, but in this
exhibition there is a change: these elements are no longer the means of the work,
but rather its theme.
My work has a continuity constructed on the basis of subtle changes, which are
revealed gradually, even to me. Steam, fire, water, dust, infiltrations and
pigments are only some of the elements that constitute my painting. In this
context, a stability seems unlikely, but it takes place to the degree that the
material is densified. This winds up being a basic and essential principle of my
painting, as the way it is made becomes increasingly more central in the search
for this unlikely stability.
So there is no relation of tension between fluidity and stability?
No, on the contrary. The stability is constructed by the fluidity. The video
Performed Painting 1 – Infiltração [Performed Painting 1 – Infiltration]
shows the entire process of infiltration that I used for the canvas Fluidos e
Fixos – Infiltração 26 [Fluid and Fixed – Infiltration 26]. I spray
compressed air and water onto the paint that was on the back the canvas. The
spray pushes the color to the other side of the surface. I usually apply the
paint to both sides until I find the “right” side. With this process I seek
blends of color in relations between the origin and the disappearance of the
color per se and as a material.
And this relation between the colors plays an essential role in your work.
Yes. On a single canvas I use fifteen or more tones of a single color, without
this, however, meaning that it is monochromatic. A painting is not just all blue,
because there are many tones of blue along with the relationship between them.
When I do this, I am dealing precisely with the material’s provisory state,
which is provisory because the color is present as well as absent. It is visible
but at the same time it nearly isn’t. Therefore, on a single canvas I have
fields of light, spaces of total absence of pigment, and even areas extremely
saturated with color, but without volume.
In this process, at certain moments colors and lines take on a nearly graphic,
affirmative presence, while others are like vestiges, traces, infusing the work
with doubts and moments of desistance.
There are moments when everything disappears. I think, “I’ve done away with the
artwork. It no longer exists.” Everything disappears, and then I begin again and
things start to arise and re-emerge there. They start to become stabilized. When
I am making a work I have the sensation of the present time, of now. Arnaldo
Antunes has a song that says “Agora, já passou” [Now, has already passed], and
in this now that passed there is a vestige.
In the film Performed Painting 1 – Vestígio – Guignard [Performed
Painting 1 – Vestige– Guignard] the vestige is the main character.
We filmed a story that happened to me when I was sixteen. I went out with some
friends to fly a kite on the road near my house. My red kite went into a low
cloud, I thought that I had lost it, but it came back to my hand all wet,
staining everything that it touched. I think that this was the moment my
painting began, because it was then that I was able to perceive the fluid
material of things. It is a painting/film. And this work is an homage to
Guignard, whose works had a liquid, washed aspect. It was as though he wanted to
find his space by washing the European color.
In what way are you interested in time?
I’m interested in the time of color, the time of observation, time as a
material, as a basis of painting. My works are not made just once. Even though
in some cases they can be grasped in a single glance, in other situations a more
prolonged gaze is necessary to absorb it. Amílcar de Castro used to come to my
studio, bringing other people with him. He wanted them to see me painting. He
would always return wanting to see the finished work and once said: “Niura, your
work is a wallop.” He was right. There is the deliberate construction of a
chromatic pressure that is very important. In this exhibition, once again, I
create an installation by proposing a chromatic pressure, and each painting is a
piece composing the installation as well as existing as a separate work.
And it is a pressure that is structured, a process that either condenses or
empties the fields, but they continue there, accumulating.
We talked a lot about how my work is not only a gesture. It is not gestural, in
this sense, they are constructed fields that are established in relations
between absence and presence.
The work contains the memory of these efforts: the fields that were covered
and those that remain visible. It conserves the path taken in the attempt to
reach somewhere.
I have the sensation that what is appearing there already existed beforehand,
and what I do is bring it into the field of the visible. It is as though I were
enlarging its state of being. This once again gives rise to that idea of the
present, of now. Sometimes I feel whereless. That’s when I go to the studio to
paint. It is as though I were creating my own where.
Fernanda Lopes
October 2009
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