She works for accumulation of quotes, colors, shapes and memories
Repentance, stratification, geometry, control: if the words were colours, as in the vowels of Rimbaud’s work, Beatriz Milhazes' vocabulary would have the polychromy of her paintings. Above all, a non-flashy but far from neutral tone - one word - would regulate the contrasts between the colors, the same that gives the title to her solo show at the Guggenheim in New York (until September 14th): rigor.
In her works, we find references to Brazilian modernism and folklore, the colors, the forms of Rio
The references, almost quotations, are in fact rigorous to Matisse and the golden season of Brazilian modernism, or to the folklore of Rio, to the colors of Rio, to the forms of Rio; rigorous is, again, the reinvention of a technique typical of the avant-gardes, collage, as monotransfer: simple geometric shapes drawn on plastic that are then recomposed on canvas, giving life to complex and imaginative architectures with proportions so exact that they never become stucky; rigor to see well there is also in those that the artist calls, in Italian, pentimenti: the possibility offered by monotransfer to correct something by pasting over something else: as the medieval palinsests told by Thomas De Quincey to describe the mind - parchments that were scraped to be reused, but from which the text of which we wanted to get rid sometimes resurfaced - Milhazes' works make up layers that preserve memories, imperfections, as the sediments of previous geological ages constitute the soil on which we live.
Monotransfers are geometries drawn on plastic and recomposed on canvas that give life to imaginative architectures
A work, in short, by accumulation: of quotes, colors, forms, memories. The process is a story that is told, showing the narrative mechanisms that compose it; as in Macunaìma by Marìo de Andrade - perhaps one of the most important literary legacies of the 1922 Semana da Arte of São Paulo, the artistic event that opens the modernist season in Brazil - technique and exuberance, an exuberance that is expressed by accumulation and a technique that stops the accumulation one step before the excess, form an unlikely marriage that is the result of exact calculations as those of a scientist and chromatic sensibilities reminiscent of carnival. As obvious as it is, even abused in relation to the Brazilian artists, in the case of Milhazes the reference to carnival seems mandatory: if the novels of Dostoesvkij were defined polyphonic for the richness of voices that compose them, Milhazes' paintings are polychromatic, composed of variations ranging from serious to comic, in a continuous reinvention of fictitious hierarchies that last from dawn to dusk, and reinvent themselves the following day, in a continuous feast. Curated by Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães.
In her, exuberance is expressed by accumulation and technique stops the accumulation before it becomes excess
Beatriz Milhazes
Rigor and Beauty
New York
Guggenmheim
curated by
Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães
until 14/09
