Texts / Paulo Herkenhoff, 2016
Paulo Herkenhoff
INTRODUCTION
An analysis of Niura Bellavinha's painting in its most extensive and profound dimension requires a transversal view of history and media while understanding that art's rich linguistic flow has constantly attended her painting project over three decades, displaced from its condition as object to activate semantic processes and the sign's polysemization. The present essay is distinguished by a constellation of arguments that are not necessarily inter-concatenated by water and rust as stylemes or any logical reason in terms of mining vocabulary, since critical discourse pursues scintillating ideas, availability of gazes in relation to the hypotheses suscitated by this art. On the phenomenological dimension, the essay sets out to apprehend scintillations emanating from Bel-lavinha's painting. The expansion of painting in this corpus poses a complex Shuttling between history, traditions and possibilities. What is being practiced is an ars pictorica of deviations formulated by paintbrush, buckets of water, bodies, video cameras, meteorites, photo camera, kites and other means. At this point, the work done has been incessantly expanding painting's sign through certain edge experiences: dripping as brushwork, shooting star as pig-ment, reflecting pool as painting's support. Her oeuvre is a vast experiment inerrant visibility. This essay sweeps across Painting in the hope to extract singularities and distinguish similarities, to juxtapose traditions and experiments.
A perspective of Bellavinha's oeuvre points to water's polysemy rather than its being reduced to the status of styleme. A styleme relates to an invariant feature of a style according to Luiz Carlos Costa Lima.' Under a regime of se-mantic variance, water is the element that takes on many different tasks and qualities such as reflecting water, lens water, dissipating water, igneous water, diluting water, signifier water, signified water, semantic water, logical water among others in the current of painterly language. This singular and multiple water leads to Gaston Bachelard and Clarice Lispector, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Luce Irigaray, Zygmunt Bauman and João Guimarães Rosa. Similarly, the painter Bellavinha's approach prompts analyses of other artists of her genera-tion, such as Caetano de Almeida, Ana Horta, Daniel Senise or Adriana Varejão. Can the analysis of certain scopic regimes remain unaware of gender affect-ing the production, social circulation and economic apropriation of painting? Given art's role as capital investment, should a video projected on a screen be the conclusion of the painterly process? Should meteorite dust be applied as pigment to add value to painting, or subtract from it?
The body and its absence, slowness and repetition, investing desire, capital acumulation, the labor regime, waiting are engines and times that stumble like the stone in Carlos Drummond de Andrade's anthropophagic poem "No meio do caminho" [In the Middle of the Way] (1928). [...] In the middle of the way was a stone/Never, me, I'll never forget what happened/in the life of my oh so wearied retinas/Never, me, I'll never forget that in the middle of the way/ there was a stone [...] Culture in Brazil is tasked with constructing the poetics of stone, as in the set of twelve soapstone statues of the prophets in the churchyard at the Sanctuary of the Good Lord Jesus of Matosinhos, on the sacred mount of Congonhas do Campo (1800-1805). The painters Manuel da Costa Ataíde (1762-1830), Alberto da Veiga Guignard (1896-1962), Frans Krajcberg, Manfredo de Souzanetto, Niura Bellavinha and Carlos Vergara ex-tracted color from stones and soil. Their aim is to unleash the latent paint-ing in stone, awaiting the painter, thus reversing Michelangelo's dictum that painting added matter per via di porre whereas sculpture took it away per via di levare. Stone does not contain the body of David or another tridimensional figure in the manner of Michelangelo, but it does contain the surface-color taken from the landscape and the soil. This painting was necessarily part of the definition of pictorial code and sign from Minas Gerais over a cycle of two centuries hence its also being ipso facto necessary for an understanding of painting being temporally out of joint in Brazil.
GENEAOLOGY
"At age of 13, I was taking a non-degree drawing course at the art school Escola de Guignard. During a break, I stopped off at the door of a classroom in which Amilcar de Castro was teaching Bi Tri. I was standing there, watching, so he invited me in and asked students to lend me paper, India ink and brush. On finishing his explanation, he asked everybody to do a dot and a line: I stuck my brush in the pot and immediately met his request [...] He then asked me to attend his classes, adding that I should go ahead and pursue a degree in art! A few years later, when I was enrolled in the 'higher' program, he told me to continue going to his classes and suggested renting a studio away from the school. 'Art is not done at school, which is good for making contacts and building relationships. he said. The following year he invited me to join his Advanced Art Program. In the late 1980s, as I have mentioned, I started to wash paintings; I wanted to wash away 'influences and get to do authorial painting.- "Guignard used to wash canvases with turpentine, he said, before adding that my paintings seemed to be continuing what Guignard had begun: white without white paint, white that looks like light' but is the raw canvas that had to do with Guignard's drawings and some of his paintings... I said - and he agreed - that the white of raw canvas had to do with engraving, photogra-phy, radiography and especially with cinema, in which white is light," Bellavinha said. Turpentine would have been for paintings such as Noites de São João [Nights of Saint John) dotted with sky lanterns, in which thin paint becomes ambivalent, the matter of the mountain more solid, and the mist more tenuous and more dissipated. The whole effort of painting is to keep the world in a state of suspension.
The widespread citationism of recent decades has greatly facilitated the Ives of artists appropriating their predecessors' ideas and visual solutions. Nevertheless, the prevailing approach is often an attempt to consolidate or clarify a certain genealogy and obliterate any more striking influences in order to affirm a person's authenticity and creativity. This syndrome encompasses fear of being accused of plagiarism, pastiche, imitation, counterfeit or copy, or being seen as derivative, imitative or behind the times. In other cases, there is an attempt to tap professors' prestige and legitimacy, as if they had the power of turning students into artists. Two stories from the history of geometric abstraction in Brazil may elucidate this matter. Lygia Clark had studied in Paris with the renowned Fernand Léger, but had a higher opinion of the obscure Isaac Dobrinsky (1891-1973). "My professors were Fernand Léger and Dobrinsky, who was the least accomplished artist of the two, but the greatest teacher I've ever had, Clark stated. The sculptor Sergio Camargo crafted a consistent background for himself by filtering out the time he spent in the 1940s at Academia de Altamira, in Buenos Aires, during an extremely conservative period under Lucio Fontana. He also started omitting his stay in Paris in the following decade, when he studied under the conservative Emmanuel Auricoste as a continuation of inadequate training under Fontana. In Art et technique au XIX* et XX* siécles (1956), Pierre Francastel, who studied in Paris in 1961, like Camargo, summarizes the importance of modern sculpture around Constantin Brancusi and Henri Laurens. Camargo then started to cite them in his resumé as acquaintances and influences while deleting references to Auricoste, which was clearly a tactical maneuver to boost his self-worth through references sanctioning the prestige he sought for himself. When Ferreira Gullar and the neo-concrete artists acknowledged their basic references in Kasimir Malevitch, Piet Mondrian and Josef Albers, Lygia Clark wrote an imaginary Letter to Mondrian (May 1959). "You siready know that I am continuing to work on your problem, which is painful"" she wite, but she was not trying to ride on the latter's coattails. Bellavinha's words take us to the literary critic Harold Bloom, who wrote of something similar to Camargo's syndrome in The Anxiety of influence (1973)? The preface to its second edition revises some ideas and includes the notion of poetic misprision generated by the misreading at the base of this anxiety in art. A lack of creative productivity or depotentialization of invention is closely related to melancholy and social dystopia.
In the 1910s, when Picasso and Braque were locked in fierce authorial competition, they would sometimes date their works by the day, since a year dating might not show who had been first to create something. As a field of self-expression in which works are overwhelmingly produced by individual authors (rather than pairs or groupal, the fine arts are Bre terrain df ekebas is lectivity and personal exposure, competing directly in the madate lace on pies and wing for space in magazines and pies ge af alery or mueum entsn. In this context, they engage in visible confrontation when dealing with the value in the social domain of fetishism, and the role occupied by Nucleo Bloom refutes the notion of Freudian-Oedipal rivalry. Often the presenceof repression of the artist-subject and exclusion of other artists—a type of attempted cultural homicide. Brazilian psychoanalyst Eduardo Mazehe concluded that "culture indirectly affects the body, determining side a equilibrium, health or illness and, in extreme cases, life or death. A column assassination thesis that was endorsed by moviemaker Glauber Rocha's Crisis profoundly affects the way artists perceive their own constition on the level of individuality and subjectivity in the art system. Their own production may then be affected as well.
There is a dialog of magnitudes between Guignard's diminutive ant watercolors (untitled, 11.0 × 13.2 cm and 6.8 × 6.7 cm, MAR Collection) some geometric-gestural drawings by his student Amicar de Castro dore with vit paintbrushes (eg, untitled, 1975, 47.8 × 65.5 cm) and Bellavinha's nateclo (Transformador, 2006, MAR Collection) through a jarring fluid mechanics b Guignard, mastery of the diminutive field results in dimensional inversion d amplitude and vastness extracted from the small space, Amiar de Castos space is a summary and expeditious act guided by intuitive reason, economy of gesture and restraint and Bellavinha as abundance and exparsion, This chapter is called "Genealogy" but it could also be titled "Guignard's Granddaughter." The main aspect now is no longer the transcribed version of the or igin, but the individuating effort of the painter Bellavinha, who seems to orce again demand the genderless voice of Clarice Lispector's The Strom of Le 1 paint as a profound exercise of myself."
HUMANO IMERSO [SUBMERGED HUMAN]
The etymology of immerse and submerge goes back to the first century, to the Latin mergere and further back to the Sanskrit mai. Montaigne weste od peoples of old being submerged or overwhelmed by the inundation of wn-ter from heaven. * All variants involve sinking or being plunged into water or some other liquid. In many languages, water is associated with onomatoes plonger, splash, affondare, borbujas, Blose, igoropé (Portuguese for stevn and catarata [Portuguese for waterfall in art, there is Humano inerso I fe existence of each subject, Humano imerso refers to embryo and fetus in its place in the womb; therefore, these paintings relate to the intimate vaties in which grave silence now echoes. It is actualized simultaneous a sofia. and depth of an imagined being in a state of bodily rarefaction and macie condensation. In this actualization, Niura Bellavinha accumulated acmospher states of matter, whether it be aqueous, liquid fid re fat on. Ton Bachelard pouchoseshot of water. Timeless, sumptuous states of the world Zygmunt Baubam's liquidity of moder life or Luce Irigaray's fud mechanic in her conceptual reconfiguring of "female."
The perspective of Humano imerso, which a voung Nura Bellaha stared in 1991, prompts the sense of a liquid dynamic in which the subject is sub merged. Saving oroportion, siven the differences between their arguments this series of paintings may be tentatively seen as an intuitie prelude to the philosopher Zvemunt Bauman's notion of liould life “in a society in which a conditions under which its members act change faster than it takes the eto consolidate into habits and routines." Liquid life is precarious. consciousness and pace of existence alongside those Bauman deplores.
Humano imerso is one of Bellavinha's paintings that territorialize immersion in the indivisible particularity of folds in the soul (Leibniz, as well as in fantasies of infinite immersion, descent into chaos, phantasmal emergence and knested of the abyss, perhaps the shallowest of states in this topology pretend to pronore abyssal or inhuman images, cosmic prandeurs or unat- Free of theatricality. Dantean circles or vanishing perspectives, space does not tainable spaces of fantasy, of invincible nyctophobic terror. It is here, in the human measure of a phantasmatic potential of the primitive aqueous and the perennial depth free of etiological reveries through art. Perhaps the best introduction to Bellavinha's liquid corpus in relation to Bachelard's psychoanalysis infinite found in bodies of water. Humano imerso aspires to be as pictorial and of reverie in Water and Dreams (1942) is the notion of depth, rather than the fleeting as the Zen space-time unfurled in Tomie Ohtake's pintura cega (blind painting) series.
An evocation of Edgar Allan Poe informs the analysis of Bellavinha's liquid territories throughout her trajectory. In Poe's imagination, the images of water exactly follow the course of each reverie - and all are reveries of death*, and Bachelard warns that all pristine water is "water that must darken, water that will absorb black suffering. All living water is on the verge of dying."? The psychoanalysis of water as element arises from the very idea of human immersion; it springs from the strained delights of Jardim flutuante [Floating Garden], because Humano imerso confronts the inescapable nature of death as locus of nascent life. Bachelard's entire phenomenology of water comes together in his conclusion that matter reveals thought. In his philosophy, water is indeed feminine, though only up to the point when "a malicious duel between man and the floods begins. The water becomes spiteful; it changes sex. Turning malevolent, it becomes male, Bachelard wrote in Water and Dreams." Hence the painting's title reiterating water's male gender in O infiel/Jardim noturno [Infidel/ Nocturnal Garden) (1992).
In his watercolor The Mewstone, Turner features rock and storm-swept water at Wembury Bay, Devon, on the southeastern approach to Plymouth Sound, which he visited in 1813. Its harmonious aesthetic exacerbates the dramatic clash between fluid and solid mechanics. Turner depicted natural elements with the same fierce agitation of seawater in 17th-century Dutch paintings, and minute details of the ocean's terrible spite bordering on the evil water apprehended by Bachelard, wandering between imagination and reality." Turner realized that the immediacy of experience and extreme confrontation between sublime and malicious are crucial to destroy the stabilized view of landscape.* In Bellavinha's painting, the locus lingers between terrestrial and aqueous like a hidden force of nature captured under the painting's surface. On the threshold of her career as a painter, the canvas Sordin submerso (Submerged Garden) 1995), following Humanos imersos eschews Turner-like contemplation of sublime liquidity and is content to settle territory in which pictorial liquidity rests like a refuge of the gaze on a palette limited to nuances and lacking any face.
Bellavina's oeuvre has been hailed as a relationship that will sometimes intersperse a focus on water or other times on earth covered by the physics of fluid and solid mechanics, showing an imaginary between vulva and phallus, liquidity and solidity, man and woman. Water is female in symbolism, as was often stated in the 20th century. Here we take a first detour to understand the mechanics of Humano imerso. Luce Irigaray's Ce sexe qui n'en est pas unle adds to this assertion that the concept of female itself must be reexamined in a different way to deconstruct the Freudian theory of femininity, as against the female being the male's inverse, negative or complement. Irigaray argues that women emit the fluent/ fluctuating/ flouant as a means of thinking the structure of the subject and his inclusion in the social order and logic of capi-talism. Irigaray then suggests reexamining the economy of women's pleasure and the female model as fluid mechanics from which the economy of sperm has always been excluded (Due to fear of castration and rationality in solid mechanics, sperm is not placed in the category of bodily fluids such as blood, sweat, menses or urine). Humano imerso sets fluid mechanics against solid mechanics. Irigaray favors rethinking Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un (This sex which is not one] as a way to challenge the currency of a "semantics of incomplete human beings."
Given fluidity as a condition lacking worth, how may it be transformed into power? Irigaray's Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un argues that fluidity is a hallmark of the female's radical otherness, from which she extracts strategic conditions to enable an imaginary emancipatory female flux." For the artist Carol Arm-strong's close reading of Irigaray, water represents fluidity in its condition as Other before the solidified real. On this axis of female/male selection, her poetics of photography uses metonymy to conjoin water and earth. In this series of Bellavinha's paintings, earthen tones of gray and brown fit into the aqueous domain like essential human anatomy. Armstrong and Bellavinha converge toward an aesthetic of sexual difference!®️ In this same ethical domain, Carrie Mae Weems, Adrian Piper, Lorna Simpson and Kara Walker, from the United States, and Maria Lidia Mariani and Rosana Paulino, in Brazil, assume an additional emancipatory responsibility in their ethical view of racist violence against women of African descent in post-colonial society. The language in The Stream of Life, by Clarice Lispector (a Brazilian writer shaped by Jewish exile), is enunciated by a being of unstated gender to destabilize the conscience of any subject, no matter who, that is submerged in fluidity.
Jardins
The Jardins [Gardens] project was born in the early 1990s, with paintings created using the technique the artist had begun developing in Humano imerso [Human immersed]. By launching jets of water and compressed air onto the ink deposited on the canvas, spots reveal ephemeral images, exposing a new archeology. From such instability, the pictorial excess allows Bellavinha to find some stability. "Between the rarefaction and the transformation, I find something that did not exist on the visible plain," explains the artist. "The gardens are to the forest, as the aquarium to the ocean, as art is to the unconscious. If you don't take care of them, they end...." she says. The title O jardim do Stalker [Stalker's garden]—a diptych also exhibited at the 24th Bienal de São Paulo—is an explicit reference to Andrei Tarkovsky's movie.
SABARÁS
The deep red of Niura Bellavinha's Sabarás allows immersions in a highly colored environment that brings to mind the chapel of Our Lady of Expectation in Sabará (Nossa Senhora doÓ de Sabará) that, in view of its decorations with gold-gilded wooden panels imitating Chinese lacquer, Germain Bazin" rated as one of Minas Gerais' most beautiful Baroque monuments. "When my father first showed me this jewel at the age of nine, I was not really able to appreciate it. A few years after his death, I was trying to join some missing links and I froze absolutely still when I realized that it was all being revealed to me," the artist stated in recollection of her first exposure to chinoiseries. Like Zaira in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, this Sabará is a place of relationships between the dimensions of its space and the events of its past: "The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand." Members of the religious orders who landed in colonial Brazil's coastal cities, Bahia and Rio, circulated information among the continents. These missionaries pivoting from Asia to Portuguese America invented a "Brazilian China". "This transposition of Asian signs — from Goa, in particular - to Minas Gerais, and the urban constitution of Sabará and Ouro Preto, both already metropoles by the 18th century, have been significant considerations for my work? Bellavinha's chinoiserie-like work is a miner's dream between visual-art values and memory transfiguring visible matter. The painting revisits the baroque rural array of rustic colors but also shows the fragility of this interpretation: like Guimarães Rosa's Riobaldo quoting Dante or other great writers, a backlander's homely platitudes cannot encompass the complexity of Baroque culture.
The Sabarás series drew inspiration from a lacquer-coated door brought from Macau for the chapel of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception in Sa-bará and then copied for the chapel of Our Lady of Expectation, in that same town. Bellavinha suggests that the original door from Macau (the one on the right) "may have been made by an artisan originally from the [former) Portuguese colony in Asia, while the door to the left is visibly a copy made by a ham-fisted local craftsman. Papers containing references to its origin were destroyed in a fire. According to oral tradition, the parish was officially recognized in 1701 but its construction continued until 1714. The Macau door may be considered one of the first Baroque pieces to show Chinese influence.
Bellavinha's use of pigments surely reflects historical prägnanz in their Gestalt pithiness. Although related to the red and sanguine composition - and safe for any analogy of organic content - this painting does not render carnation because it does not simulate, as in baroque art, a layer of "flesh" being placed over a wooden sculpture, "on the bone". Instead, Bellavinha "picks the flesh off" the painting and works with sanguine flesh though never alluding to the image of blood, to any oozing liquid, or to a wound or mutilation. Nor does this painting convey the pathos of Guignard's religious images. If blood is the edifying example in the baroque and its reappropriation by Guignard, one could quite consistently claim that Bellavinha's "blood" is alive with sheer vital flux - an element of physical composition devoid of emotional charge or symbolic construction, thus a purely visual event.
Bellavinha's baroque imaginary converges to Clarice Lispector's reflections on the real and abstract instance in one of the latter's 'chronicles' called "Uma porta abstrata* (An Abstract Door): From a certain point of view, I consider making things abstract as the least literary approach. Certain pages, void of any events, give me the sensation of touching my own essence, and that is the greatest sincerity. It is as if I were sculpting - what is the most authentic sculpture of a human form? The body, the outlines of the human form, the expression of the form itself of the human body - and not the expression "given' to the body:" For nearly three decades, Adriana Varejão has worked on the traditions of cultural exchange between East and West as foundational components of Brazil's visual culture. She articulates images from the history of art into a critical ooportunity for political comprehension of the pretent dar Her painting Passogem de Macau o Vila Rica [Passage from Macau to Vila Rical Asian landscapes, she cites the blue pottery of Macau and the baroque senti-renders a horizontal narrative of the variety found in calligraphic scrolls and ment in the lacquer-coated bleeding heart. Brazilian churches are situated in a Chinese landscape in which the mountains of Minas Gerais morph into rock. faces. Varejão realized that Guignard envisaged this "China" when sketching. vertical perspectives. On the way from Macau to Vila Rica, Vareião points to the mental itinerary of Man apprehending the world as a totality on the routes of ocean voyagers, traders and missionaries. In conclusion, Varejão and Bel. lavinha may be viewed as authors of a singular oeuvre, while complementing each other in their extreme difference.
The architectural quality of the Sabars, with their broad brushstrokes, ever steady and vigorous, sometimes dense, is founded on the strength of their ver-ticals. The body formulates a painting through the painter's muscle tone rather than her wrist and paintbrush. The corporal determination in the direction and scale of these brushstrokes lend an edifying sense to the architecture. They are decisions of the engineering required. Each of Bellavinha's pictorial acts is rendered with the steadiness of a column sustaining the gaze in the construction of a monument. These are the minimal markings of Bellavinha's "abstract door". The eye finds passages or openings in the topography of the frame that have been opened by the medium's absence or rarefaction. They are breaches through which the gaze penetrates and extends across the colonnade. Gaps in time. Fissures in memory. Her allusions to the Macau Gate of anonymity and her childhood.
*My issue was to reduce - not color, but the medium. One may be tempted to say that Bellavinha does not paint red, apparently, she does not investigate a specific color. That the realm of her Sabarás could not be monochrome because there is not even a reference to a palette from which a prevalent color would be selected or deduced. Bellavinha refrains from using white, which emerges only as light emanating from the painting. Pigments saturated in water yield blue veins emerging like arteries visible under the skin. However, Bellavinha reiterates that "red comes from iron" and iron in turn is part of the composition of blood. What we see, then, incarnated in her studio, is iron rather than red; it is the medium of the world rather than color. Her painting is thus part of the mineral family of Amilcar de Castro's sculpture. While the latter's flow alludes to red cells, its vehicle could then be a form of plasma. This blood pigment is therefore ore, since the etymology of hematite and red blood cells relates to iron. In terms of painting as a kind of sanguine action, Bellavinha's interest resides in circulating rather than coagulating blood. This is how history permeates her work as a circulating substance that "confers" density on the present.
The pictorial field in the Sabards takes on meaning as a tridimensional space via the layering of the painted surface. The procedure used for this painting singularly overlays two canvases to work on them simultaneously as part of a same pictorial act. Bellavinha paints directly on one canvas while letting color seep through to the other. The top canvas is therefore painted since it absorbs the unabsorbed or excess paint filtering through the top in full view, like alluvial gold. The other becomes a kind of blind painting canvas. The first is visible surface, while the second canvas would be like a Beological layer from a stratigraphic perspective. The bottom canvas is men-ory: there is something buried under the geological layer of the top painting like undereround sold. Bottom paintings are not ghosts, minor reflections o copies of the too ones. In some cases, Bellavinha touches up these second screens if the paint seems to be fading or is in need of a different temperature or rendering some kind of architectural plan. The bottom painting collects the surplus with which it makes itself feasible as painting, rather than image. In the top canvases, painted in full view, the process leaves its imprint. In the bottom paintings, chance happenings are initially more a question of blindness or pseudo-blindness, since there is a known "something" and a pre-existing intentionality. Yet, one has to consider the movement of fluids, their mechanics, dynamics and the depositing or settling-down process. Something there is announced as archaeological strata. "I am not concerned about what is on the second canvas. I take no notice of it, even. I go for the element of surprise. As the mystery goes on taking shape, I start to feel I am reaching the point of stopping. Therefore, Bellavinha's Sabarás are to be shown in pairs: not as diptychs, but side by side, like infidel twosomes.
Transformadores
Including Painting with Rain (urban intervention)
Using methods and techniques that evince a reinvention of "painting," the artist presents the solo exhibition Transformadores [Transformers] at Galeria Manoel Macedo. The intervention Pintando com chuva [Painting with rain), placed on the façade of the gallery, reveals new possibilities. Devices allow the water to drain and find niches where the artist gathers pigments. A metal pipe, measuring the same as the wall in height, emanates steam from its base in an upward movement, creating a contrast with the "paint" that drains. Dealing with chance and also taking advantage of an unstable matter, Bellavinha creates other paintings using the technique that blends juxtaposition, compressed-air jets, and water on liquid pigment. In a constant process of "presence and absence," in the words of the artist herself, the paintings establish a physical relationship with the viewer, as her trajectory turns increasingly to photographs, films, videos, sculptures, and installations but always starting from that which is pictorial.
INVISIBEL ZONE
In Brazilian art, a red shift - or a reddening of the space-light - is observed that relates to gravitational fields, from Hélio Oiticica and Cildo Meireles to Emesto Neto. Einstein proclaimed the existence of a point in the universe where gravitational shift to red takes place. This was the point of departure for our analysis of Niura Bellavinha's production at the dawn of the 2lst century.
1. Sabará/Mangueira. The project for the Stables at Parque Laje was divided into conceptual areas for installations, objects and videos: Sabará Mangueira, A seco [Dry], A medida do impossível [To the extent impossible] and A onda como o tempo - a construção do oceano [Wave as time - construction of the ocean], installed in the residence's pool. Whereas A seco fills a room with colored fabrics, Sabará/Mangueira allots color on surfaces like a clustering of spectral energy that captures the viewer's gaze and hosts the body. Ferreira Gullar's Teoria do não objeto [Theory of Non-object] stated that artists were breaking away from the frame in an effort to free themselves from the conventional frame of culture, in order to rediscover Malevich's desert in which, for the first time, a work of art appears free of any meaning other than its own appearance.
Aluísio Carvão's edge-work Cubocor (1960) eschews notions of Concrete structure and composition. The deconstructed painting-object solved painting's concerns posed in Descartes as seen in Merleau-Ponty in Eye and Mind: vision and painting, absent depth, tridimensional, perspective, natural and artificial geometry, frame as window on to the world. A solid-painting emerged to break the outside of the cube with a paintbrush. Oiticica's Núcleos and Bólides were to be post-Cubocor color walk-throughs (Penetrável). Bellavinha reflects them in the room she titled Sabará/Mangueira, an architectural environment for the body in which thirty Ninhos [Nests) containing remaindered pigment packaging are arranged between Bólides [Fireballs] and Yves Klein's Ex-voto a Santa Rita de Cássia (1961), in a duel between immanent and transcendent. Klein addresses Santa Rita, the patron saint of lost or impossible causes, to implore her intercession so that his art may create Great Beauty. In Bellavinha's Sabará/Mangueira Agnaldo Farias found our roots, which he described as na "almost indiscernible amalgam of languages, materials, objects, techniques and ethnicities. We have been made up from spoils, like a culture of dust, the ephemeralness of which is maintained at the expense of its imprisonment in a glass chamber."?9 From red and pink, Farias refers to Sabará's baroque as pigment "originating from China" and pink, which for him is the "trademark" [sic] of the Rio de Janeiro samba "school" Estação Primeira de Mangueira, to the fruit of the mangueira (mango tree), originally from India. Thus, any reduction to colonial trade and capitalist property (trademark) poses complications. The taste for red comes from exchanges of objects and techniques from China, such as lacquer - even more influential than imported pigments or the color of Macau's Red Gate. To reduce Mangueira's green and pink to a trademark is to mistake the symbolic universe of emotional color from the most traditional and cherished samba "schools" for the condition of an intellectual property business. For a Rio de Janeiro native, long before mangueira [mango] was a tree or fruit from India, it was the name of a samba "school", a major railway station and a favela whose "setting is so beautiful" in the poetic imagination of the songwriter.
II. Red. For physics, a deviation corresponds to a light beam's slight redshift, since the beam's color may vary under the effect of a gravitational field. In stellar physics, Einstein's Theory of General Relativity notes that the light coming from a star needs part of its transferred energy to overcome strong gravitational fields. Light may also shift to ultraviolet or infrared frequencies, gamma rays, radio waves or microwaves. A redshift occurs when light is attempting to break out of a gravitational field, in the form of shifting wavelengths of the atoms' acoustic spectral or chromatic lines. On the visible spectrum, red is the color that has the longest waves. In sound waves, the reference for colors, red is a low-frequency color.
III. A history of red in Brazil. Redshift is an unfinished discourse awaiting trans-versal, transgenerational, extra-chronological interpretations in Brazilian art. This shift first appeared in the blooming garden-redness in Visconti's L'Adieu (1917) as the flame of desire when young lovers part. The hoisted bodies of Tunga's True Rouge (2000) with their abrasive, phantasmal chromatic energy, homophone nature (true and trou), the body's desiring and drifting. Between Visconti and Tunga, the black sunset of melancholy is featured in Oswald Goel-di's urban twilights. In Brazil, the educational background of an artist is thus informed by the chromatic fever experienced in the supra-sensory spaces of Hélio Oiticica's Núcleo; by the inflection of historical materialism in the flag of Antonio Dias' The Invented Country (God-Will-Give-Days), or by Katie van Scherpenberg's abrasive Rio vermelho (Red River) installation. It is also informed by a stroll through Cildo Meireles' Desvio para o Vermelho [Red Shift]" or yet on penetrating the innards of Aluísio Carvão's Cubocor.
The series Bólides (Fireballs) was named for the celestial body (meteorite) that produces a great impact and a trail of bright light on entering the Earth's atmosphere. Oiticica's supra-sensorial is embodied in sensual color-light at cosmic melting point - these clusters of color exist as high-voltage percep-tion. After Milton Dacosta's sophisticated Em vermelho (In Red) paintings (1957-1959), monochrome met with an impasse in sensibility that was solved by the quality of construction of chromatic energy in the paintings of Tomie Ohtake. Electromagnetic color waves forming incandescent circles are emitted by Ohtake's brightly flaming ensö-universe like the solar halo in an event of fire eclipsed by fire. In the aesthetic experience of Zen Buddhism, the Japanese word for circle - enso (F#1l) - symbolizes enlightenment, the universe and void (mu) that arises from a moment of freedom of the mind. Throughout Ohtake's lifetime career, she was tirelessly engaged with ens in painting as surrender to fukinsei (75J5) #F), which is the negation of perfection. Strictly speaking, in the exercise of painting. Ohtake assumes beauty and the paradox of contrasting opposites such as control and blurriness of the real in brushwork. Serene rigor springs from the slow internal history of the artwork in which paint and color are states in an artist's timeframe. In opposite symbolic order, Paulo Meira's orange-red installation Concerto para final de milénio [Concerto for the End of the Millennium) (2000) contrasts homophones of the quasi-ant-onyms concerto and conserto ["concert" and "repair"] to lock tensions between dysfunctionality and deconstruction, abrasion between rhythm and disorder, juxtaposing the contemporary liquid lifestyle's rush and entropy. The absurdly fleshy and sensory red of Gonçalo Ivo's set of paintings Oratório [Oratory) (2009) as well as Oratório da aurora [Oratory of Dawn] surrender to a contrite gaze before the raw flesh of the canvas, not as the Sacred Heart's baroque grief but in the exuberance of painting's celebration of life.
Núcleos, Cubocor, Bólides, The Invented Country, Rio vermelho, Desvio para o Vermelho, Manto Tupinambó, Patas, True rouge, Concerto para final de milénio, A medida do impossível." Desvio para o Vermelho [Red Shift) comprises three environments: 1. The room named Impregnação [Impregnation]. furnished with red objects, mediates the gaze directed at the world through a red filter and a grammatology that Lisette Lagnado inventoried from monochrome paintings to clothes, from machines to living beings, as categories of the sought-after objects of middle-class desires." Bellavinha refers her visual thinking to this Impregnação. 2. In Entorno [Surroundings), a red liquid pours out of a tipped over bottle and floods the room. As in Saint Augustine's fa-ble, the small bottle contains more red liquid than its volume would appear to hold, knowledge results from the path from limit to power. 3. Desvio is the final confrontation with the terrible sublime: a sink in the twilight spills blood red liquid falling transversally in defiance of gravity, incomprehensibly disobeying and deviating from the laws of physics. When Meireles was a boy growing up in Goiânia, his father took him to look at a corpse. The dead man's purported offense had been scribbled on the wall in his own blood: "Here died a journalist defending freedom of expression." The "terrible sublime" is not blood but the disturbingly deregulated flows devouring the logic of the gaze. Bellavinha's geological piece incorporates iron oxide, magma red, electrically charged pigment ion and rock-like blood in tectonic upheaval, thus Sabará being symbolic of cultural roots, just like Mangueira and Lygia Pape's Manto Tupinambá (2000).
"In the depths of the Earth was begotten dark Tartarus, and finally Eros (Love), that gave rise to all other things. Here is my red liquid... hematoid-cere-bral-source that flushes me out of love for myself, and l ignite the flame I carry inside," Delson Uchôa wrote. "The red of Manto Tupinambá flows in my veins. Some other time I may speak of Auriflama. There are so many reds that no eye sees a same color."35 The most strident coloring in contemporary Brazilian art required a special vocation. Uchôa is the physician-painter inspired by Portuguese poet Camões, a contemporary of Bellavinha's with the epic erudition and sensitivity of the physician-poet Jorge de Lima. Uchôa weaves two poiesis from epic-Dantesque discourse submitted to the flesh condition of painting. Discourse torrentially pours out verbal-visual language and Orphic visions, therefore providing the bloodstream and body-pigment material borrowed by physician-artists. Birth/red is "love of origin that flows and nourishes./ The liquid color of erotic influxes, the force of divine ecstasy," Uchôa reveals. Next to Uchôa's carnal viscerality in Adriana Varejão's cannibalish flora, red is the color of metabolic photosynthesis in large tiles featuring carnivorous flowers, mirrors of desire. Emmanuel Nassar has the estrangement of nature setting fire to the visual field like a burning fire that turns viewers into witnesses of the devastation of Amazônia. The convulsive surfaces of Varejão's large blue tiles reflect the mechanical violence of the sea while the color on her red tiles does not coagulate time or matter but vascularizes light over antiseptic white.
IV. A medida do impossivel [To the Extent Impossible]. A group of naked women scatters white dishes on the floor of a room and then start blowing red pigment that flutters in suspension before landing on the plates. A medida do impossivel is the unbounded extent of desire 36 Bellavinha explains: "Color has nothing to do with gender. Contrary to what the misogynistic world may think, my red has nothing to do with menstruation.." A liturgy of the body in Lesbos based on pictorial material condition stimulates the relationship between color and sexuality that brings to mind Louise Bourgeois' Red Room. "Red is neutral like black, white and some shades of gray (...) as is clearly shown by Matisse's Atelier Rouge," Bellavinha concludes.
With the Nave Deusa [Goddess Vessel] that he produced for the São Paulo Biennial (1998), Ernesto Neto's oeuvre takes up its condition as cosmic womb, a star before becoming a black hole. In the same period, he produced Patas [Hoofs], large tubes made of transparent elastic material filled with spices, seasonings and smells such as annatto (herb used by Brazil's indigenous peoples). A settlement of these sculptures articulated a garden of the senses with col-or-spice, haptic stimulus, odor, the memory of the thump of a hoof hanging from the ceiling that bangs against the floor. Patas evoked the question of dry paint in Brazilian art from Oiticica's Bólides involving generations, with artists such as Carlos Fajardo, Paulo Paes and Geraldo de Barros. Its pictorial use of Formica relates to Daniel Birnbaum's phenomenological inquiry and reflection in Chronologie: "Is the intentionality described by phenomenology, and the ambiguous flesh of the active spectator who enters the work of art and profoundly explores its most extreme possibilities, that determines the limits of possible subjectivities? Is it the artwork in itself that defines the parameters of potential new forms of subjectivity, perhaps involving modes of consciousness that evade the structure of phenomenology? Red dust in suspension relates to the physicist Sten Ostenwald's question: "Is cosmological redshift real, or is it an optical illusion caused by dust? The shift to red expands visual concerns such as the gushing water in Desvio para o vermelho [Red Shiftl and the dry powder in the floating pigment of A medida do impossível (To the Extent Impossible). This dust is of the same carnality as Oiticica's Homenagem a Cara de Cavalo (Tribute to Horseface], a monument to social tragedy, or Ernesto Neto's Patas.
Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology addresses the analysis of the extent of the impossible. The French philosopher juxtaposes the carnality of things to the cube obiect in relations of reversibility between object and gaze: the cube brings together "as my body" that which is "at once phenomenal body and ob jective bodv"4 Carvão's Cubocor operates by intertwining with the body to find a new Merleau-Ponty argument based on a Valery theme: "lending his body to the word that the artist changes the word into paintings: elviha ceats games of borrowed bodies based on the system of perception of that work het own body in Valéry's dimension, the body of performers and, by means of reversibility as per Merleau-Ponty, the bodies of viewers/spectators. This is also the symbolic value claimed by Neo-concretism. Merleau-Ponty also talks of the "flesh of the visible" meaning the carnal being, the being from the depths, with several in layers, the being of latency. There is a prototype of Being, of which our sensory, sentient body is a significant variant.
From the point of view of Einstein's Redshift Theory, art would be a sort of indistinguishable parasitic phenomenon in the universe, somewhat like certain cosmic situations described by physics. Presented at the 25th São Paulo Biennial in 1998, this trajectory featured a historical corpus of cannibalistic installations and sculptures. This retrospective included Hélio Oiticica's Nú-cleos and Tropicália, Lygia Clark's A casa é o corpo, Antonio Dias' The Invented Country (God-Will-Give-Days), Cildo Meireles' Desvio para o vermelho [Red Shift, Antonio Manuel's Fantasmas, Carmela Gross' A negra, Adriana Va-rejão's Tiradentes, Ernesto Neto's Nave deusa, and a set of Delson Ucha's paintings. Its steadfastly conceptual, phenomenological, political and plas-tic-artistic agenda apparently touched a nerve for the painter Niura Bellavinha, who deliberately joined this gravitational red shift of Brazilian art with the solid project she titled Zona invisível [Invisible Zone] for the Stables building at Rio de Janeiro's Parque Lage Visual Arts School campus in 2003. Her unique production for this process reiterates that, in Brazilian art's shift to red, symbolism is both political and subjective, being organic and sensory, red being the color that circulates inside us and retains its non-actuality and significant might.
WATERS
Painting as limnology. From the Greek limne (water) and logos (study). Or would limnological painting be the study of the subject? Limnology: scientific study of inland tracts of water. There is inner symbolic water in every subject.
Sisyphus and Narcissus
Narcissus carries his amorphous liquid rock. Sisyphus bears his mirror. Narcissus heaves his sun-discs. Sisyphus supports the changing landscape. Narcissus reversed: you will bear the weight of your mirror! The tireless Sisyphus beaded in sweat from the effort of painting, a futile one since all results in painting require starting over as the problem of human knowledge. Narcissus wanders tween-waters, tween-mirrors, tween-bodies. In Pampulha, the Sisyphus river flows uphill against gravity. Only a moving mirror may reject its territorial domination by Narcissus.
Everything, or almost everything, in that place is artificial. The lake, now of water sequestered by an aloof city and a predatory state capital. Reflexa is an island surrounded by invented water.
Gender
Allegorical inversion: the man carries the water bag. Locus inner fluid in the uterus). The amniotic sac, or fetal lake, is the man's burden. A watery dwelling. Over the amorphous sculpture, fluid mechanics and the threshold of breaking water, coming forth to the borders of light. Every birth augurs a death. As João Cabral de Melo Neto put it, painting is heavy with death, like still water.
Over-landscape
Among shadows, lights, nights and eclipses - Paisagem zero," the soft-stones of water translucence. Sisyphus heaving sun bags.
Changing landscape is provisional, vestige landscape, specular water and for all that, this cleft water can only be mobile mirror.
Twilight waters, still waters, cushions of reverie. Time for casting light into color. Layers of fire. Igneous waters.
In journals kept during his Rio de Janeiro sojourn, the young sailor Edouard Manet noted of its twilight hour: "The sea tonight was more phosphorescent than usual, the ship seemed to be crossing layers of fire; it was very beautiful.
ESPELHO MÓVEL
The urban intervention Espelho móvel [Mobile mirror] explores the notion of expanded painting through a series of powerful spotlights strategically positioned to cover liquid surfaces, with three hundred meters of light transformed by filters that had been previously chosen. Held at the Rodrigo de Freitas Lagoon and the Pampulha Lagoon, the artist also plays with the light that falls upon the architectural surface, turning the surroundings into a large moving picture. Adaptable to any surface, Espelho móvel also got another version, entitled ReTurner, in its Pampulha edition, in which an assembly of bonfires, steam, and lights resize a painting by William Turner.
Projeto Reflexa: Bálsamo & veneno performance
The artist presents project Reflexa at the Museu de Arte da Pampulha, which includes the performance Bálsamo & veneno. Choosing the building's surroundings as a starting point, Niura Bellavinha explores the dichotomy of the relationship established between the lagoon and its visitors. A place covered by nature, but its primary source is completely polluted and unhealthy. For Bálsamo & veneno, which refers to Plato's pharmacon, eight thousand liters of water were transferred to the Museum employing a liquid propellant. Water beds, often used in hospitals for healing and hotels for pleasure, serve as a recipient for the water. The action begins in the morning, with sixty performers positioned in front of Casa do Baile, located on the opposite side of the lagoon. Each holds a mirror in his or her hand, on which the artist throws light beams. Inside the Museum, other reflexes emerge. "Light is feminine," according to the artist, and worked here from a physical point of view, it lends its name to the project, Reflexa. In the early afternoon, the performers start to walk along the edge of the lagoon, carrying bags of water, and arriving at the Museum around 3:00 p.m. They bathe with the water they have in their hands, undress, and enter the venue. The clothes represent the hypocrisy, both from citizens and public officials. In coordinated movements, they walk on the water mattresses, highlighting the water as a central element of the performance. Paintings made with water from the lagoon are also a part of Reflexa.
PLOP! A PARENTHESIS
In the middle of the gallery, dripping color incessantly falls onto the canvas. Drops define the surface-method as action, semantic process or state of the verb "to paint" as "becoming", while chance shapes and reshapes amorphous-ness in a non-stop process of becoming endless blue. The "drip method" reinvents - from Michelangelo's theoretical distinction between painting and sculpture - the former adding medium (via di porre) in opposition to the lat-ter's taking away, as when hewing marble (via di levare),
In 12th-century Italian, porre was defined thus: Transitive verb 1. Fissare, stabilire qlco.: p. le basi di alco. 2. Ammettere, supporre alco. Il poni caso, pon-iamo, ipotizza, per ipotesi, spesso come frasi incidentali col valore di segnale discorsivo. 3. v.rifl. [sogg-v] Presentarsi, risultare evidente. 4. [sogg-v-prep.arg Mettersi, disporsi in un luogo o in una certa posizione o condizione.
Gravity
Goteira [Dripping] underscores the physical nature of painting and its method of constantly challenging both the magnetic force of gravity and the phenomena of hydraulics and fluid mechanics - a real-life fantasy on the fragility of experience.
Difference and repetition
The semantic spout extending from a ceiling slab yields drops of constant color and medium repetition, stressing differences and singularities of the sign. "Op-pose repetition to moral law, to the point where it becomes the suspension of ethics, a thought beyond good and evil," Deleuze wrote to explain Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. "Repetition appears as the logos of the solitary and the singu-lar, the logos of the 'private thinker''! Repetition may be tragic or comic, yet it may be essentially symbolic too. Deleuze infers that symbol or simulacrum supports repetition itself: repetitions, even asymmetric ones, are interdependent. One initiates that which the other carries out.
Drip culture
In Goteira, painting assumes a double condition: as critical assertion of the white cube in the relation between art spaces and both power and wealth, in O'Doherty's analysis; and as account settlement with modern Brazilian architecture like a sort of factory that produces drippings from Oscar Niemeyer to Lina Bo Bardi, from Affonso Eduardo Reidy to Vilanova Artigas. In the sensual, organic or brutalist architecture of surfaces mercilessly subordinated to the unrelenting humidity of the tropics, the poetics of reason sinks under the slightly exposed sensation of a precarious and primitive pot-bowel civilization as providential module. Meanwhile, Bellavinha's painting keeps dripping.
Poetics of the senses
Reading is not seeing, just as seeing is not listening, Jean-françois Lyotard argued. But the eye does hear, the poet Paul Claudel interjected. Goteira's eye is listening to "Toada da chuva" (1936), Guimarães Rosa's poem about the sound of rain beating on windows:
(Fair rain, light rain,
winnowing in the air ...
If you are so sad in your dripping, Then why do your mocking hands come to tap on our windows?! ...
"Why next to each persistent dripping, if there is always a poet listening?!...")
Guimarães Rosa's verbal dripping distills a procession of graphic signs and retreats to the confines of parentheses: inquiring with a question mark, shouting with a soft exclamation mark, and pondering with ellipses, as if these distinctly repeated graphic-verbal noises would nurture the extended time of the incessant, polysemic and multisensorial flow of color on the white cube's stained floor. Thus is painting delivered unto the forces of the world. Painting may then be distilled as a movement of Physis in a shift to blue.
Fluidos e fixos
The title of the project, Fluidos e fixos [Fluid and fixed), is related to Clarice Lispector's novel Agua viva. The series also includes references to the Uki-yo-e art genre. The term ukiyo-e means "pictures of the floating world" or "the way of seeing life," and it refers to a woodcutting and painting movement that flourished in Japan between the 16th and 19th centuries. Its chief exponent is Katsushika Hokusai, best known for the series of landscape prints Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, which includes his iconic painting The Great Wave off Kanagawa, created during the 1820s. It is through that gaze that the artist embarks on liquid and fluid issues of impregnation. Artworks that overflow in seas, clouds, currents, winds, dust, waterfalls, storms emerge. Mountains turn into the sea. "The world that goes by is the sign that unfolds from managing painting as something fluid," says Bellavinha.
LUCO-FUSCO (TWILIGHT)
Although titles do not resolve a painting, appropriate ones may broaden conceptual agendas. Besides, titles may also instigate a problematizing or naming exercise. Caetano de Almeida and Niura Bellavinha are two artists of the same age whose paintings named Lusco-fusco [Twilight] were done for different reasons during a 20-year period. In an allusion to mov ie-theater ushers, de Almeida defines painters as "ushers of the twilight" for their way of problematizing light. His Lusco-fusco (1992) is actually a pair of juxtaposed paintings that bring to mind René Magritte's ambiguous strategy, whereas Bellavinha's Lusco-fuscos (2006) series attempts to capture morphing shadows. De Almeida places Lusco-fusco on his non-style agenda, while Bellavinha contextualizes her Lusco-fuscos in the mighty linguistic flow of painting's fluid medium. The dubious lighting of color structures in de Almeida's pair of paintings situates his subject in the intermediate time and cinematic transition of differences from one to the other. In turn, Bellavinha's coloring is challenged to be asserted as luminous and fluid.
Each of Bellavinha's Lusco-fuscos is situated between two phonetic phenomena for the same light-time transition: the rhythmic Portuguese term lus-co-fusco" and the languid-sounding crepuscule. In Latin etymology, lusco-fus-co means "light that is fleeing." Light turning into darkness is neither day nor night, neither "still" nor "now", but an in-between instance. Hence the gradations of darkness captured by Bellavinha's paintbrush. The cognitive function of darkness and shadow that Ernst Gombrich analyzed is a key means of recognizing the world's reliefs and the possibility of differences. Bellavinha's pictorial experimentalism reconciles Gombrich in projects such as Espelho móvel Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas [Mobile Mirror Rodrigo de Freitas Lagoon). Another sunset related term is crepuscule, from the Latin crepusculum, the diminutive of crêper (crèperus) referring to dark. To produce crepuscular painting, Bel-lavinha had to master color and make it truly act as dubious measure of light, the luce incerta of Latin etymology. She is not attempting to represent a hesitant chiaroscuro luminosity like Magritt's ambivalent time of day in Empire des lumières (1953 and 1954), nor is she appealing to crepuscular somberness based on that chromatic opacity of color we call dirty. Her propositions strive for the realm of uncertainty and equivocation of shadows shown as potent questioning for the gaze, formulating new hypotheses for currency. Bellavinha therefore sees painting itself becoming a crepuscular practice.
Within a phenomenological viewpoint, Bellavinha unwells twilight-paintings because she realizes that "unters you descend to the twilight, you will not bring anything to leht?™️ as prychotherepist Paulo Barros affared. Her quick and light-averse painting speeds actual transition of space rather than gesture, as it she had already gone beyond the suspended time of Tarsla do Amaran's O logo [The Lake) (1928). That said, Tarsila's proposal - From our wonderings, we will rest in this quiet lond - draws on Hermann Hesse's poetic images. Whether painting, or photography. Bellavinha's work attains the aching, certainty that time cannot be paused. Her crepuscular palette in the Lusco-fuscos uses gradually shifting hues - blues, pinks, purples or blacks - to situate luminous structure between cerulean blue daylight and nocturne darkness, interspersed with voids, transparencies and effulgent condensations on the horizon.
The intertwining of Lusco-fuscos and Hesse's 1948 poem Abendrot relates with the etymology of the noun Abend (evening) and the adjective rot (red) to propose temperature inversions. Both Hesse and Tarsila in her O logo create a quiet country scene with the cooling nightfall. Bellavinha puts forward replacing her earthen reds as in Sobards with cool blue; the poet inverts Abendrot in grand poetic solitude to the point of concluding with somber reflection, asking "Might this now be death?" In the writer's symbolism, twilight reiterates the proximity of death, breathing light fantastic and emitting pallid dreams. Intimate as a canto, a lingering last light. Hence, Bellavinha's work being irreducible to Hesse's persistent pessimism, or Richard Strauss's Four Lost Songs related to his poetry. However, the Lusco-fuscos are neither kissing, death nor negotiating to fantasize about it in order to ponder immortality. The black sun of melancholy, as in poet Gérard de Nerval's words of mourning, neither rises nor sets over territories of dimness in Bellavinha's sunset. Free of psychological drama, her Lusco-fuscos re-designate the transitional period of "between" light, ie., between that which is now still day and that which has already become night, without being either day or night, because everything is fleeting. Crepuscular space is the space-time of the in-between, the transition, the meandering between distant points of a journey, Marcos Ferreira Santos wrote in his scholarly essay," in a passage that elucidates the meanings that Bel-lavinha's painting brings up. Night and Day would be two irreconcilable con-ceptualizations of philosophy, between the idealism of the grand reflection of truth and materialism its adversary. Seized by contradiction and paradox, Gaston Bachelard adopted the latter on behalf of the former, as necessity for an historical epistemology. Thus, the hopeful positivity of the Lusco-fuscos resides in understanding that the "consciousness of the chiaroscuro of con-sciousness as Bachelard professes, "is present in such an enduring way that every being awaits an awakening, an awakening of being.
VENEZIANAS
In the Portuguese tradition transposed to Brazil, particularly in Rio de Janeiro as depicted by Debret, the architecture of a townhouse façade posed a membrane between its interior and the street. Latticework windows afforded sensitive bodies air-vented respite from tropical heat as well as communicative views of the outside world from their interiors, while also shielding their rooms from any unwanted gaze of passersby. In terms of morality, this wooden grid from the Iberian tradition with its Moorish mashrabiya (screening) function was quite unlike the confessional's wooden lattice. Ideal for the reclusion forced upon Arab women, it allowed some degree of unilateral visual communication without relinquishing its strict biopolitical function Marcelo Campos challenged women's emancipation when designating as mashrobiya oesthetic this architectural element used for visually cloistering Arab women, which was introduced in Brazil. Niura Bellavinha's grids take up the architectural membrane, be it mashrabiya or Venetian blind, to focus not on the object sought by the gaze, but precisely on an adverbial condition of the surface as crisscrossed field, le, or tranversus painting as in the Latin term for "crossed side to side" or oblique. This slanted gaze is Bellavinha's critical attempt to comprehend modernity, Historian John Elderfieid deplored the fact that grids had been overused as easy and contrived supports to effortlessly function as readymades in default mode to feign certainties. Put briefly. Elderfield was censuring the grid's being reduced to the status of a geometric pretext to justify paintings."
Mashrablya aesthetics in Bellavinha's corpus takes on the grid as a paradigm of modernity's spatial rationalism to claim it as a prying device. Progressing the point raised by Elderfield, Rosalind Krauss saw the grid as modernism's core myth, "the modernity of modern art." To Krauss, the grid showed denisl of the pust and retained focus on visuality alone, asserting a desire for silence and symbolizing hostility to literature, narrative and discourse, whereas Bellavinha thinks that Brazil's unconcluded modernity has to revisit/ review the mashra-biya's patriarchal architecture.* The pertinent aspect of her Venezionos is its resuming the original modern status of problem rather than solution, which was previously assigned to the authorized geometric grille.
In this section on Bellavinha's production, emphasis should be placed on the fact that painter Caetano de Almeida misrepresents the grid's solemnity and structure to make it strange and incongruous and his approach is Ekened to a fencer's thrust and parry.* Contemporaneously, the prostrate and fatigued restlessness of the grid and its mythic condition becomes "emblematic of visual infrastructure* from the structuralist perspective of modernist geometric myth.* Caetano de Almeida and Bellavinha use the grid phenomenon as a becoming of the void. He views the grille as a game of hide-and-show; she sees the grid's ramifications exploring certain boundaries of the visible. Cae-tano de Almeida's Ares and Bordos series integrate a system of broken, holed, frayed, fractured, disjointed, and faulted spaces apparently activating modernity's traumas, starting from his emblematic paradigm of the grid. Bellavinha largely eschews grids and their use as a means of totalizing structures, an idea repudiated by Ernst Bloch in relation to the aspect of utopia in culture." The devistions she commits in deconstructing that myth are not something to be narrated through the grid, even to subvert it. Her Venezianas are instead posed as dialectical hypothesis inscribed in the social process of producing form - a troubled dispersion of the gaze to prevail as a phantasmal subtlety of boundary, rather than disorder.
A pre-mythic aspect of the grid is evoked in the debate of Bellavinha's green Venezionas that juxtapose Japanese Ukiyo-e printing, Alberto da Veiga Guignard and Rosalind Krauss. Against Krauss' view of the grid as anti-naturalistic and with a certain connotation enunciating the photosynthetic structures, Bellavinha poses a certain organic aspect in her green grilles of landscaping or pastoral grids, such as orchards, or as paintings by JoJo Baptista da Costa or his spectator, Guignard. What is more, Bellavinha's hortus conclusus resorts to the same trelliswork effect" as Guignard's painting Parque Municipal de Belo Horizonte (1949), which he picked up from Ukiyo-e woodcuts." The Japanese trelliswork was revisited in the painting of Claude Monet, Pierre Bonnard and Gustav Klimt, and again by Carlos Oswald and Bruno Lechowski in Brazil. This trellis or "grid effect" theorized by Siegfried Wichmann consts of arranging tree trunks in the foreground, sometimes as rows, forming a screen-like defensive barrier through which a luminous landicape may be glimpsed, or in this case the primeval light under Bellavinha's vague grids. Wichmann concludes that trellises organize space and assert Nature's "infinite diversity" and "Spiritual unity: Other Venezioanas are structured in the manner of gilles (designed for) scorching temperatures or louvered gravity-wall grids, their tortusus outlines rising from slightly viscous diuted paint yielding to a vertical transi. tion to gravity for a run-off or dripping effect. Following Antonio Bandeira," Bellavinha organized her structures through ambivalent relations between crooked line, articulation of signs and gravity's precision as the medium descends over the painting's surface.
With obscure lines, Niura Bellavinha domesticates sunlight in an effort to render a noire architecture of light and shadow, akin to the brise-soleil notion dear to the tropical and modernist architecture of Brothers Roberto (ABl building, 1936-1938) and Oscar Niemeyer (Obra do Berço, 1937). Grid- or lattice-structured screen walls are frequently features of Japanese architecture. Outer walls (shoji) and inner dividers (fusuma) lined with rice paper produce interiors under the rule of light and shadows. Another Venezianas variation is the designed grid in which shadows acting as sieves filtering light are interwoven into space. Its light-averse gaze peers through grids of alternating shadows and sparkles, light varying from overabundance to scarcity. Between discreet Japanese trellis and glaring sunlight, Bellavins introduces peeping grids. Her gaze reflects Lasar Segall's in his print series titled Mangue (1929) with a brothel in which the indiscretion of a lecherous gaze alternates between offering and waiting, invasive indiscretion and eager exposure. Krauss' grid remains anti-mimetic and anti-real, whereas for Bellavinha it is also a way of showing capital-body relationships. All that is left for the grid, other than its status as a field of holes, involves being the territory of leftover freedom.
Noturno
The artist presents Nocturnol.., a twelve-meter high piece that combines painting and installation, built from silk fabrics impregnated with blue, red, and ocher pigments. Supported by iron reels (a reference and tribute to iberé Camargo's painting) and copper wires, the internal floor delimited by the painting is entirely broken to reveal the natural color of the building foundation: mustard yellow. The work is outlined by a poem by Fernando Pessoa. Body and gaze are both unstable as the painting. it absorbs everything and everyone around," in the artist's words.
EPPUR SI MOVE, OR PERFORMED PAINTINGS
The study is about painting. It is about the impossible fluidity of matter, the sequence of acts and gestures, the quasi-theatricality, and the image's process of becoming in the gerund of the verb "to paint". It is about concepts and ideas put together in a painter's imagination and their process of coming into existence, the activation of an artist's imaginary, duration, the incorporation of chance, and the discipline required in relation to gravity, viscosity, and kinematic potential.
Performed Paintings do not mean to refer to the pictorial process of Jackson Pollock's action painting, or the 1960s Aktionismus movement launched in Vienna by Hermann Nitsch, Rudolf Schwartzkogler, Günter and and Ode Mohl Bellavinha does not opeate a citationism that could posity derive any kind einority or historiographical legitimacy from her production, since restorative part is Concept applied to painting: te. Unlike Palock or the Austrian painters, it does not involve a subject in the process of enactment. The becoming of imagery in Performed Point Angt is of a different order that show ubley in deviating from the history at painting Unsuspecting viewers may be nonplussed in a mirage-e-Son state when detecting motion of a full threat-le silver of paint slowly spreading across the painting surface like a restrained dynamic.
In Brazi, the origin that is not to be found in Pollock, the Austrian artist O Robert Moris Columns (1961-1983) righty tends to be seen as preceded by the Boles neoconcretos in the work of an artist who unfailingly has appreciated historical references to the Baroque culture of Alberto da Veiges Ovinand, Amiliar de Castro, and the Neo-concrete artists, among others. Performed Paintings do not evince the deliberate theatricality of a Columns performance: When analyzing Morris" work, Rosalind Krauss™️ was not aware that Lygia Pape's Bollets neoconcretos (1958 and 1959) had already assumed the plurality of meanings in face of Concrete phenomena. As quasi-thester or quasi-dance, these Bollets assert themselves as neo-concrete art to broaden the phenomenological hypotheses of the Concrete style, going beyond the canon of absolute objectivity. Ballets relativize Michael Fried's similar daim that "The success, even the survival, of the arts has come increasingly to depend on their ability to defeat theater: 70 In Bellavinha's corpus, Performed Paintings dialogue with her own proposals and widely differing proposals as in the series of paintings Translúcidos (2000 onwards), Linguagem (A medida do impossivel (2003 onwards), Vestige (2009), and NháNhó (2014).
Becoming and gerund
The gerundial nature of Performed Paintings is a metacritical standing of the many hypotheses of pictorial facture taking place in disjointed temporalities. As Celso Cunha has noted, Brazil's variant of Portuguese uses the gerund more often than the gerundive infinitive." Bellavinha's series Performed Paintings brokers its own process of becoming as phenomenon constructed by the author herself "on the fly". or "making by doing" - a state of painting happening dynamically but gradually - that conjugates the verb in the gerund or as gerundive infinitive." Unpretentiously, Bellavinha does not set out to fully discipline painting in its broad and historical nature of being physical medium.
To extend and potentiate the polysemic nature of the pictorial sign and its exchangeable nature, painting would have to be taken as morphosyntac-tic phenomenon, In other words, this means that the artist would go on to articulate painting's morphological issues and syntax, taking up its canonical elements such as words in language, relations of agreement, subordination and order, the point that painting becomes a passive entity that requires nothing from viewers. Comparatively speaking, Performed Paintings reassert the formal and political relations interconnecting painting's constituent parts, re-attributing dynamic to it through structure. The morphological operation of the pictorial medium involves the reconfiguration, however perceptibly, of the painting object and language in its ontology.
Performed Paintings put forward the need to return the gaze to what was apparently a painting already "painted" by posing anew the triadic question of time as past, present and future bridged by duration. The image's reception is claimed as an open-ended instance of the present: one in which the subject re-temporalizes here and now as an unfinished stage of the sign. In this respect, painting will never "dry up".
The changeablity noted in Performed Paintings is not the ambivalence of space or a virtual variant of image, since the verb "to paint" incorporates the act of projecting videos on a surface pre-treated with painting's material signs. Therefore, it is not a matter of a "painting" being tansformed into an ambivalent image, because there is none in this project - from a decetological point of view, the painting starts to exist only in its painted corporest condition when video is projected over it. Once the video projector is switched off, Performed pointing appears as incomplete, emptied, in repose and latent in its condition as signifier.
The virtual and visible flow of "fresh paint in Performed Paintings places a paradoxical will of kinematics over the material stability of painting, The canvas then takes over as the place of non-foredness, discontinuity, destabilization, and production of pictorial inconclusiveness. Performed Paintings introduced a diachronic dimension in a language osciliating between physical reiteration of the canon and rupture and expansion of its linguistic domain. Performed painting acts as space-time behavior open to new mutating corporeal-imagistic experiments. It is a subtle "becoming" that projects the fluidity of matter subjected to gravity, as paint oozes and flows. That which was previously static. since it was dry, is now performing, Eppur si muove? (And yet it moves?)
Duration
"if time has a positive reality, if the delay of duration at instantaneity represents a certain hesitation or indetermination inherent in a certain part of things which holds all the rest suspended in it, in short, if there is a creative evolution, I can very well understand how the portion of time aiready unfolded may appear as juxtaposition in space and no longer as pure succession. (Henri Bergson in Duration and Simultoneity).
From her corpus, Bellavinha has learned that the awareness of duration marks the constitution of art's time/tempo in production and reception processes, as in neo-concrete works by Lygie Clark, Oiticica and Lygia Pape. In his Manifesto neoconcreto (1959), Ferreira Gullar argued that poetry itself is posed in time rather than space, because this is where the word unfolds its complex significant nature. He wrote, "It is obvious that we do not mean to return to the concept of time given by discursive poetry, because while this language flows easily, in neo-concrete poetry language opens itself in duration. (.) In neo-concrete poetry, language does not flow away, it is enduring. Duration actuated by phenomena overlayed by transmigration of media and actions in Performed Paintings points to a dialectic of time beyond accumulating techniques, the unfurling of aesthetic acts of painting's space brimming over, from painter to viewer, from physical support to temporality. Proposed as experience of singular and immanent fluid continuity, temporal overlays of material acts beguile perception.
Fluidity of matter and process of becoming
The moving elements of painting act as a phenomenon of objective questioning and poetic cogitation, since the becoming of concepts and ideas devised in a painter's imagination reach the real world as a purely dichotomous relation between imagination and reason in Guston Bachelard's Poetics of Reverie." From the latter's point of view, Performed Paintings return the dreamer to picturesque ife: "In his solitary reverie, the dreamer of cosmic reverie is the veritable subject of the verb to contemplate' (...) The World is then the direct object of the verb to contemplate" "The pictorial object, le, the painting is no longer satisfied with the notion of canvas, because now it will not be just a support for pictorial medium on the fabric, nor will it be a movie screen on which a filmed motion picture of fluidity will be projected. Bellavinha's painting becomes a centaur that brings to mind that image of being material and ideas noted by the critic Harold Rosenberg when defining postwar art: "The idea of art as the action of the artist's materials complements the idea of art as the act of the artist." Bellavinha's centaur complex innovates in dichotomy, focused on the relationship between mass and immateriality, constituted in poetic play with the apparent density of a body covered by light and video image. However, her operations meant to bring together concept, corporeality and aggregated immateriality cha up introducing a two-headed centaur
.
METEORS
For a century, the skies of Brazilian art have been showered with meteors and cosmic or atmospheric phenomena, from Henrique Alvim Corréa to Niura Bellavinha, through Vicente do Rego Monteiro, Hélio Oiticica, Fla-vio-Shiró, Arthur Luiz Piza, Cildo Meireles, Carmela Gross, Nelson Felix and Rosana Palazyan, In the late 15th century, any celestial object or atmospheric phenomenon was called "meteor" (metéora), from the 13th-cen-tury French meteore, the Latin meteorum and Greek meteoron. There was also the Greek metó (after) and onird (lift in the air). According to the Oxford Dictionary, in the late 16th century atmospheric phenomena were classified as aqueous (snow), aerial (wind), and luminous (rainbows) or igneous (lightning and "shooting stars", a name given meteors). From this stand-point, Bellavinha articulates meteors out of rain (hydric meteors) - by washing her paintings with wide strokes of color - or out of surfaces built with meteorite remains. Her work refers to Aristotle's Physies and, rather than reducing it to scientific primitivism, chooses not to deny the Coper-nican revolution. Let us forget the cognitive obstacles posed to Aristotle's physics, a complex theoretical construction integrated into comprehensive logical-philosophical thinking based on empirical evidence and provided by most immediate human experience." Aristotle explained the origin of meteors as movement of the lunar sphere, strange to the nature of being, dragging the fiery layer of the terrestrial world underlaying it. The natural movement of fire would be radial ascent toward the lunar sphere. The fiery trail traced circular motions that were not part of its natural tendency, Aristotle stated to explain the origin of meteors." Hence Bellavinha's idea of potency for the poetic oct. More Aristotelian than Platonic, this art does not romanticize stars; rather, it finds - in the body of a falling meteor - the hypothesis of recognizing the finitude of the cosmos to compose the allegory of death, loss and mourning.
Cosmic agenda. Bellavinhs obtained two pieces of meteors - one that landed in Texas, another from China - and steeped them to turn them into pig-ment. Like the red-oxides of Sobarós, many meteorites contain iron. She added hematite and speculate to the meteor dust to make Pinturas translúcidos (Translucent paints) with touches of light and traces of shooting stars. Perhaps this is why one of Bellavinha's objects is called Projeto articulodo – Guignord ITo L/Tico Barroca (2015) [Articulated project - Baroque (Ta LiTica Guignard) (2015). In the Brazilian tradition, this paradoxical and plausible "dark lighe* in Bellavinha's work emerges from dark surfaces, as in Hércules Barsott's neo-concrete painting* - the viewer's slightest movement, there as here, makes the dark surface shine again with star-like beams dissipated around the virtual expanse of the painting.
Bellavinha's paintings Pinturos translúcidos and her installation Projeto Translúcidos -Sabords: ele passou (2001) (also known as Ele possou) both feature meteorite dust that poses the subject's inquiry about its place in the cosmos. Earlier on, there was Olticica's Bólides (Fireballs), its title referring to astronomy with the Greek Boliç (projectile), which Portuguese language dictionaries define as 'a meteorite on entering the Earth's atmosphere, producing noise and becoming very bright, possibly leaving behind a glowing trail: In Bolides, color shifts from the spectrum's pure physical state to take on a significant condition at the point where color and sensoriality reach a molten state in social corporeality. Every Bolide captured the fiery instant of the astral body as symbolic instant of Zenon's paradox in suspension. Viewers have to manipulate crushed brick dust arranged in a barrel in Bólide Bocio 1 (1966) to visit the meaning of vestige of home and denote the land-owning shortage in Brazilian society, Cildo Meireles' poetic astrophysics involves galaxies and black holes. His sculpture Mebs Coraxia (1970, 45-rpm vinyl record) imbricates topological-sound forms as trans-sensory galaxies resulting from a graph set to sound in a frequency oscillator drawing, a spiral and a Moebius strip. "1 set my course on dispersion," declared Meireles." When aesthetic images attain cosmic values, as in Mebs Caraxio and Ele possou, they take the place of a vertigo of aesthetic experience. Their Bachelardian condition of "image-thought" or "thought-image* does not require a context* or cosmological place other than the here and now posed before viewers as their locus in the cosmos.
On serial painting. The origin of serial painting in Bellavinha's corpus refers to the extreme problem of modernity in Barnett Newman's The Stotions of The Cross (Via Crucis, 1958-1966, fourteen panels), furthered by Katie van Scherpenberg's A queda de Icaro [The Fall of karus) (1980) and Procissão de Corpus Christi [Corpus Christi Procession] (1982)." Serial paintings such as Projeto Translúcidos - Sabarós: ele possou [He Has Passed) and Pinturos translúcidos (Translucent Paintings) differ from polyptychs since their problem was raised by a suite of conceptually and artistically independent paintings. On being juxtaposed these paintings work toward a significant confluence or complex totality, rather than physical and formal totalization by adding or fitting stabilizers of the image's perception. In Michael Fried's critique, art that prompts awareness of physical space creates "theatricality", only art that denotes theatricality attains "conviction" and may be affirmative and actually modern." Fried also rejects art that urges viewers to move about. In 1944, Newman predicted that the art of the future would be abstract and yet charged with feelings." His lengthy Stations project revisits a restrained and intense need for expressivity. The four cases of serial works discussed here - The Stations of the Cross, The Fall of leorus, Procissão de Cospar Tito and ele passou (He Passed) - are frugal in formal terms but still require some instance of po-thos in their genesis.
Viewers often have to find their place in virtual territory to conclude the parting of serial space and temporal course. Stations of the cross, the fall, the procession and the search for "he who passed" are not extravagant itineraries but routes the symbolism and precision of which affect people's gaze on world art and drama. The story-like account delivered by the set of siteen actures from Carous Christi Procession, attributed to indigenous painter Di no Quispe Tito (161, given to paint series like The Zodioe in the Cuzco Cathe-dal, and Life of St. John the Baptist, in San Sebastián.
In her Corpus Christi Procession, Van Scherpenberg took the narrative condition of the trajectory and freely maneuvered perspective to arrange the procession and integrate its forms through the gaze. From a different serial logic, Scherpenberg's The Fall of korus* is structured as an inversion of the path of the mythological figure starting from the eponymous panel attributed to Peter Brueghel the Elder (c. 1590-1595). The "fall" is a vertiginous surrender to gravity, a submission of the symbolic before the real" beyond the moral claim. Brueghe's karus falls into the water but no one notices: life goes on. Nothing is narated in Van Scherpenberg's suite - neither lies, nor truths - as in the deso-lution of the poets. In his poem Musée des Beoux-Arts (1938), WH. Auden exposed the tragedy of suffering that Brueghel's work failed to reveal. A man was following a plow: "But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone." Wiliam Carlos Williams' despondent final stanza of Landscape with the Foll of Icorus (1960) seems to deplore the poet's unnoted springtime death: "A splash quite unnoticed/ This was Icarus drowning" Unlike the poets or Scherpenberg, Bellavinha advocates memory of affects. To restore the imaginary around the exhibition of icarus, the direction of motion-time had to be reversed and everything come to a standstill. In the serial kinematics of this icarus, the paradox is that he falls because he remains still. Only the horizon changed latitude, as if the painting were a kind of planisphere. Icarus falls because the horizon rises (with the higher positioning of the black line) from one painting to another, and precipitates him from sky to sea. The non-moving element flies and falls. There is no image of Icarus falling in this The Fall of Icorus: it is the horizon that takes flight, the landscape that is moving, because Bellavinha mocks the landscape genre with mobile immobility.
The supporting frames under Pinturas translúcidas (Translucent paintings) organize the skeleton to undertake the transparency of the meteor's epider-mis-support. Each canvas is the same body, though under different lighting. The Newmanian verticality in Bellavinha's work obeys the logic of serial sym-metry, structure is inversely repeated from the first to the third screen, and from the fifth to the seventh. Light is fully reached on the central image - a zenith - and dims out as the viewer's gaze drifts away to the left or right. The viewer's motion activates a body that has fallen from heaven, not with icarus* morbidity or the combustion of a will-o'-the-wisp, but with the vitality of a frefly. In gloomy regions, meteorite dust and specularite sparkle and glow. The motion constructed by the set of paintings resembles graphical representations of star movements or acts as a diagram of the daily solar "movement, as perceived empirically in the course of a day. Translucent Paintings and He Possed bring in astral touches, tangencies, parallelisms and collisions, as sug-Bested in the ringed route of Arthur Luiz Piza's Saturne (1976). Meteoritic iron is the basic substance of Bellavinha's painting sign. If her semantics exploit astrophysics much more than image, the aim is to reach material deviating from the irevocable collision course in the cosmos. Thousands or millions of light years ago, these asteroids departed from somewhere in the universe to be smashed into Earth. This is the path of pigment drifting in search of targets. From cooled formless matter comes pigment and its heavenly sparkle - the painting is a fallen star's retreat. Nelson Felix's large drawing Meteoro (1987) shows the vigorous transition from the muscular effort of rigid mineral matter on the primal field of ductile light-paper to mark the body of the support over time and the stellar graphite traces. In Bellavinha's spaces the meteoritic área scatters and sEglutinates dust from the universe. In short, the asteroid there is both stationary and dynamic. Its ultimate destiny is to be light-painting, so to attain greater poetic status in the universe.
Ele possou (He Passed) suggests that each painting, is tracking movements In the celestial dome, the paths of stars in the firmament, in the viewer's eyes Anyone who goes through this Penetróvel" will also be guided by our parallax view. The shard that Niura's teenage brother painted is visible under the setting's transparency and translucency. There is something, then, that is protected here from the world's opacity and the crucial unanswered question: Why? There is the locus of memory among affects, the dream recorded and the impossibility of forgetting addressed by Gianni Vattimo. He Possed is a tribute to Bellavinha's brother, shortly before his death at the age of 14, he had drawn a hand pointing to a comet on a glass windowpane.
On abandonment. The sign of the cosmos is not to be reduced to the Bachelardian process of will of meteoritic material or its imaginary configura-tion. Rather, it implants the actual use and real presence of pigment produced from a celestial body, without proposing, an astrophysical morphosis. Here phenomenological aptness is the sister of will that is not ordered by the notion of hardness of the material, but its origin and place in the cosmos. " Beyond the iconology of the heavens in trance of comics, games and manga, or even the extraterrestrial firepower raining from the sky for Henrique Alvim Corea's drawings for Wor of the Worlds (1906) (d'opres H.G. Wells), or the Armageddon and orgy of flesh of Flavio-Shird's Móquina humana (Human Machine) and Apocolyose (1966), in Bellavinha's oeuvre painting can only construct material sites, such as the interruption of the path of the shooting star. it is a matter of executing a cosmic becoming in an ultimate eschatological destination of things. The discourse of a pair of photographs (He Passed, 2001) articulates a hand that holds a meteorite and then lets the dust trickle between its fingers in a metaphorical reduction of volume to gaze, and the unfurling of time fleeing like a human hourglass. This is the primal scene of sculpture's conversion into fluent body and lithic will of painting with pigment. While cosmology asks what constitutes pigment, art explores the actualization of the impossible by bringing heaven to earth.
In relation to Translucent Paintings and He Passed, the more they appear to be ancestrally related to some stellar explosion, the more semantic they become and the more intensely psychic they have to be, since they depend less on astrophysics - much less cosmogonies - and more on the subject's readiness to pose new correlations between painting and language. Like Auden and Williams, Newman, Van Scherpenberg and Belluvinha confronted the unfathomable nature of death. In relation to unfinished modernity (ürgen Habermas)" and the exhaustion of critique (Mário Pedrosa), ** the productivity that Bellavinha has proposed implies painting taking the force of loss; in other words, language resurfaces despite being immersed in grief. This is the veil ripped in darkness: the Elbi, Eloi, lama sobochthoni? from Mark's gospel 15:34." The surface is fragile and diaphanous, but if the membrane shines in He Possed, this is due to it being illuminated like work of mourning and asking the final question for the painting: Why have you forsaken me?
Projeto Aurora
The Aurora project starts with a trip to Diamantina that leads the artist to visit a village where the last quilombolas (maroons) used to live, reminiscent of the black slaves that lived in the Salitre Cave. "They were strong people who told stories of their grandparents, of slavery," recalls Bellavinha, who soon noted that all the local houses were painted in an ocher, almost mus-tard, hue. The mortar in the walls of these houses was a mixture of grass, clay, and cow dung, known in Brazil as taipa. "I was impressed by the stories and the color. The color as a symbol of liberation," says the artist, who returned to her studio in Rio de Janeiro taking a few gallons of the mixture with her. The artistic style baroque acquired a new dimension in an environment where no one expected to find art. At the studio, the mortar is filtered with distilled water and mixed with a binder, resulting in numerous pots. Also in 1998, Bellavinha is invited for a solo exhibition at the Paço Imperial, which was scheduled to open in six months. "That potion was everything I wanted paint in its purest state, the houses, the stories... she recalls. In the process, the mortar received blue inserts made with milled azurite stone. A week before the opening of the show, as it was being set up, the curator decided to change the artist's room to a smaller, more concentrated one. The work, transformative in nature, consisted of forty square paintings, which could be repositioned by the viewer, altering the work. At the end of the installation, a revelation made by curator Lauro Cavalcanti: the so-called Golden Law had been signed in that very room. "The exhibition was called Aurora, until then a tribute to my grandmother on my father's side. With the revelation, it gained a whole new meaning, a symbol that was strengthened and seemed alive." The press did not mention anything about the origin of the paint or the story. which was told by Niura Bellavinha at the time.
NHÁNHÁ
In the context of João Cabral de Melo Neto's poetics, the painting Paisa-gem Zero [Zero Landscape] (1943) by Vicente do Rego Monteiro belongs in "a hard mineral period that drives out flora", a space comprising stars, shadows and mathematical calculations. While the painting Ele Passou has to do with the dead, Niura Bellavinha's NháNhá (2014) is the mundane dimension of the entrails of a place that needs no cosmic accident to be dev-astated. Man's voracity was sufficient to impel the Anthropocene Period, the geological age during which human activity influenced climate and the planet's environment.
In the developments arising from Niura Bellavinha's production, Nha-Nhá is the key to understand the phenomenology of her gaze, the broadening scope of her painting, and the consolidation of her political agenda. The title NháNhá refers to Nhá, and "sinhá" by apheresis from "senhora" in the sense of "milady". Apheresis refers to the process of linguistic transformation of suppressing a word's initial phoneme, so sinhá becomes nhá, which is then reiterated to lend the affectionate air of NháNhá. These words were taken up in literature and lyrics to lend an affectionate connotation to women as objects of desire, as in the lines of the 18th-century colonial Brazil poet Domingos Caldas Barbosa (1739-1800), "Oh NháNhá, come lis-ten/ pure and true love/ with languid tenderness/ such is Brazilian love."94 This Rio de Janeiro-born poet living in Portugal evocatively correlated his NháNhá with the idea of a "Brazilian love" rendered by his nativist term that takes on a meaning germane to Brazil.
The analysis of NháNh finds substantiation in a quote from Bellavinha concerning the origin of the work: "The idea for the film came from a trip I took to the town of Ferros together with my family. Those days was a time of distress and reflection on painting. I plunged into Carlos Drummond's poetry and was charmed by this small town," she said. "In the course of our journey, I saw red dust covering houses and roads. Everything was reddish: even families on the roadsides [...) This work has a social aspect too in that it denounces neglect and discusses resistance. It could hardly be otherwise, since my art comes from the Other... It is both remedy and poison."
Landscape painting may drive vision to extremes and limits, as was the case of some of the more extreme landscapes by Alberto da Veiga Guignard (1896-1962), an artist who played a key role in Bellavinha's artistic training. Giovanni Battista Castagneto (1851-1900) painted en gri-saille nocturnal views of beaches in Guanabara Bay, reinterpreting the pitch-black dark and moonlit areas along the edge of heavy shadows to describe the world. In his turn, Venezuelan artist Armando Reverón (1889- 1954) painted bright-white landscapes that seemingly correspond to the case of eyes dazzled by midday sun, his shadowless atmosphere totally dominated by refracted light in a dank setting. At the extremes of these luminous phenomena, Reveron crafted a delicate landscape like a mesh of light. In the fire-devastated Amazon region, dense phenomena of opacity are produced by burning smoke smothering forests, roads and towns under overcast skies clouded by the deformed climate. While traveling in the Amazon, the French critic Pierre Restany (1930-2003) asked "What kind of art, what language system could give rise to such surroundings - exceptional from any point of view, exorbitant in relation to common sense? (Manifesto do Rio Negro, 1978)." In his Amazonian essays, written from 1984 to 1993, João Farkas (1955) poses a paradigm for critical interpretation of this process of entropic transformation. Naturalism as the expression of planetary consciousness is no mere metaphor, Restany proclaimed. The sculptural and photographic oeuvre of Frans Krajberg (1921) was developed as an obstinate clamor arising from his keen awareness of the destruction of the natural environment in Brazil, from Minas Gerais, in the southeast, to the Amazon re-gion, in the northwest. Bellavinha's research established points of contact with Kraicberg's geographical and political itinerary. Walter Salles directed the feature film Kraicberg - o poeto dos vestígios [Krajcberg - poet of Vestiges) (1987), a leap forward in understanding Krajberg's ethical principles as an environmental activist. In Restany's words, "Integral naturalism is allergic to all kinds of power or metaphor for power. The only power it recognizes is the purifying cathartic power of the imagination harnessed in the service of sensibility. never the abusive power of society." There is a throb of life in the blinding by dust of NháNhó, like the pack of maned wolves scattering red soil-dust to blur hunters eyesight, as a means of self-protection against tracking and stalking.
Breathing in dust. Bellavinha poses her ecological critique from the dust that pervades and affects ore-mining regions in the state of Minas Gerais submitted to merciless exploitation by ore-mining companies. The many factories on the outskirts of the colonial towns, the dark color and pessimistic atmosphere of the imaginary landscape in Paisagem imaginória de Minas Gerais [Imaginary Minas Gerais Landscape] (1947, Museu Casa Guignard, Ouro Preto) proudly states the artist's vehement opposition to the pro-industry elegy of Tarsila do Amaral's Operários [Laborers) (1933). The current ethics of art has totally shifted to Guignard's position rather than Tarsila's. Where Restany problematized metaphor and claimed that nature was a huge catalyst and "accelerator of our faculties of feeling, thinking and acting." Bellavinha went on to introduce the disturbing presence of brutal pigment more ostentatiously and convincingly: earth is inhaled as dust in the landscape of NhdiNhd. The polysensoral force of Nhh excites the haptic sense of touch in dust, feeling the taste of earth suspended in fine powder and breathing its smell and taste as matter in a gymbole devouring of color as corrosive matter for the lungs. Breathing this punting and inhaling this pigment prompts the subject to measure biological effects on the body. How does breathing dust affect the lungs and hermatosie?
What do lungs breathing pigment symbolize in hiNd? This painting spells out the mining industry's biopolitics.
NháNhá harks back to the etymology of the Portuguese word pulmão, from the Latin pulmo, -onis which was from the Greek velp. Whereas the variant pneuma (vevya), Greek for wind and breath (air being breathed) takes on a sense of spirit or soul in a religious context. ™️ Two sculptors of the same generation as Be lavinha, Esther Grinspum (Grupo Móvel: a Taço de Socrates, Plotdo e a Coluna sem Fim (Mobile Ensemble: Cup of Socrates, Plato and the Endless Column], 1997) and Eliane Prolik (Corne [Meat), 1991) treat pneu-mo as tridimensional lung space. NháNhd points to an itinerary of the idea of posuma on a wide range of meanings from "air" to "soul" addressed by the pre-Socratics" and the Hellenistic philosophy of the Stoics (breath of life, generative principle, mixture of air and fire, individual and cosmos), by Hippocrates, Plato and Aristotle (vital heat transmitted by sperm). NháNhó questions how the breath of life may act with earthy-air. For the Stoics, the highest form of the pneuma (irveia) is the psyche, a fragment of the soul of Zeus. The three levels of pneuma - soul or natural spirit - in the theory of Plato (428-429 BC-348-347 BC) were at work in the vital organs. Inhaled air emanating from God was the basis for respiratory breath, or pneuma. In this empirical vision, that breath of life in NhdNhd meets with its anti-natural crisis. "Natural spirit" was in the veins energized by food consumption. On penetrating the heart, venous Iquid turned into "vital spirit". Plato's theory of the body N" was the theory of pneuma: the soul was made first and afterwards the body. In De Anima (On the Soull, Aristotle (384 BC-322-347 BC) discussed the nature of the theory of the soul (psyche) and its three types: plant, animal and rational, which remained valid in psychology until the 19th century. "There is a consequent diversity in their several accounts of soul; they assume . that what is in its own nature originative of movement must be among what is primordial. That has led some to regard it as fire, for fire is the subtlest of the elements and nearest to incorporeality; further, in the most primary sense, fire both is moved and originates movement in all the others."* Aristotle's inquiry into the soul started from the legacy definition of his predecessors (Book I) and the faculties determined by the senses (Book Il), including the relationship between breathing and smelling and the faculties related to thinking and knowing (Book III. Не frames the sensory aspect and his olfactory hypothesis of earth turned over in respiratory affectation, to eventually comprise empirical and epistemological experience on the place of the subject. The pneuma captures oxide pigment in atmospheric drift. Bellavinha seizes everything - from real dust and clouds to a meteorite or urban ponds - as an opportunity to divert toward the condition of painting. NháNhớ's subject breathes the place's excess oxide particles, incorporating the pigments in their breathing and embodying the landscape's elements of material sign as a matter of painting and of life and death for the Soul*a Nhóhó revisits the idea of landscape as extreme limit of the visible and an insalubrious place under suspicion of the relationship between capital and death. The rectangular parts modulate the dift of pigment under the command of Number, since on the level of Bellavinha's mathematical unconscious Nhó hó admits to being contaminated by the sprayed itaphic image of Jean Dubuffett's Geometrie (1959) since both wods speak to the etymology ol grometry (geo for earth, and meter for measure) in the sense of messuing the Earth to update it half a century later as a symptom of ontheopogenic draster. of the hard mineral time that puts fight to flora in Cabral's fearsome verse.
Niura Bellavinha renders an irony of Nhánhá, because in a verca it refers to an installation of fifteen red translucent, photogractic panels by Miguel Rio Branco at the home of art collector Bernardo Paz, in Inhotim. When Menique Meirelles was chair of the Central Bark of Brazi (2003-2011), the collector rejoiced because despite the weskened exchange nate of the US dolla, the price of ore rose from US$ 10 to US$ 180. So, despite the exchange rate having, dropped 100%, the price of ore rose 1,800%. This meant I could par off debt to the banks and settle back taves owed in several instalments, And I was able to triple or quadruple ort production [J) The money came in and I built, Inhotim "' The collector's Centro de Arte Contemporinea de Ihotim may be the best legacy from the international commodity boom with its iron ore prices for Brazil, and one of the great legacies from the world economys 2000-2008 speculative cycle. Nhollhd's citical dimeccion therefore does not refrain from speculating in the aesthetic domain of institutional citique. The dust from NhóNho, which seems to be coming out of the works spaces and penetrating the viewer's eyes, does not propose or enact the decine of vision - on the contrary, it works to see painting as a limit-locus potentating the gaze in crisis. NhóNhó points to guilt in this perverse cyclical mirage of the speculative relationship between art, capital and ecology.