Niura Bellavinha

Breath
Curated by Guilherme Bueno

Breath, Niura Bellavinha’s exhibition at AM Galeria, presents new works that unfold aspects the artist has explored throughout her acclaimed career. As in previous moments, these works arise from the incorporation of the processes involved in painting—that is, from the remarkable range of possibilities contained in the seemingly ordinary encounter between brush and canvas. This stems from the fact that Bellavinha does not regard painting merely as the act of covering and sealing a surface with color. In fact, at certain moments it is almost the opposite—or perhaps a limit: instead of restricting herself to the “touch,” Niura alternates between moments when the paint almost becomes embodied in the canvas, making the two not indistinguishable but one (that is, not a layer of paint on the canvas, but the canvas imbued with color), and others in which painting occurs within the tiny pores of the fabric’s weave—those minute intervals so meaningful and yet so often neutralized by painters—sometimes tracing them like a drawing formed by the drips along that thread-line that constitutes the very body of the canvas, sometimes settling into those small gaps between one thread and another.

Such subtleties result in a very particular luminosity in her works, as the opacity of color is traversed by two types of glazing and transparency: one that creates a gradation not of planes but of color density, depending on the degree of dilution with which the pigment is deposited on the canvas; and another produced by the light passing through the veil of the canvas, treating it almost like a sheet of watercolor paper through which the light shines from behind. In these paintings, the canvas becomes a point of convergence for lights and colors coming from different directions—the frontal reflection, the light source behind it, and, finally, the one within the canvas itself (the pigment absorbed by the fiber).

Another aspect asserts itself in her process: working sometimes with breath, sometimes by spraying through compressors, and at other times through dripping or dyeing, color is created by subtracting any trace of brushstroke or manual gesture. It is as though these were paintings “untouched by human hands”—to recall the notion implicit in the origin of several (especially sacred) images—and, in this sense, Niura repositions the power of art within the profound dimension of the creative act: her performed breath gives life to the artwork. (From mythology comes the term numine afflatur—literally “divine breath,” inspired by a god from whom poetry is born—which appeared subliminally in previous works, such as the performance À Linguagem / A medida do impossível [To Language / The Measure of the Impossible], 2003).

This act seems to suggest deeper issues, such as the deliberate contrast between pigments extracted from the earth and those fallen from the sky, exemplified by her use of meteorite dust, which grants the works not only a “cosmic” light—as if bringing a starry sky into the quadrilateral margins of the canvas—but also a tension between its punctiform brilliance and the somber, silent darkness that stretches across it. Of generous dimensions, many of these works envelop us, evoking a cinematic screen where there is nothing but light and color, inviting us to inhabit them.

— Guilherme Bueno