Texts / Ligia Canongia, 2004
Niura Bellavinha – The real as painting
Colors are the true inhabitants of space.
Yves Klein
The foundation of Niura Bellavinha's work will always be painting, which is her language par excellence. Color is the primordial element; color as a structure of space, even when made liquid or aerial. If we are, therefore, faced with a performance by the artist, the tone of the work will certainly still reside in color, just as this will remain the issue of other works that focus on the three-dimensional field.
Painting has not been limited to the domains of the canvas for a long time, to the point that certain contemporary experiences have extended the pictorial concept to the pure chromatic application on any matter, and that color can present itself as an autonomous entity in space. Hélio Oiticica's Spatial Reliefs, already embryonic in his Meta-schemes and in Suprematist paintings, have implemented this “spatialization” of color in Brazil since 1959.
It is also pertinent in this comment to remember that Jackson Pollock, through painting, historically became the “father” of performance. The artist's use of his body on his long surfaces stretched out on the floor gave rise to conceiving an action in real space, based on an action painting action. Thus, since the end of the 1940s, one could already foresee practices that would lead to performances, and even happenings, with and through experiences originally arising from the world of color.
The performance The Measure of the Impossible by Niura Bellavinha, however, refers to the universe of painting, not only through the protagonist presence of color. The performance action begins in a completely white space, where the floor is treated as the surface of a still life table. There, on this floor-table, columns of white dishes are stacked, immersed in the stillness of a silent and static space.
Still life is a pictorial genre that has always excelled in the immobility of the image, impervious to narrative, the idea of continuity and affective or symbolist rhetoric, which ended up giving it signs of modernity. In it, it was not possible to detect content of a psychological nature, nor heroic or mythical exaltations, leaving, for the first time, the approach to be made from the pure perspective of the qualities of the painting. And, without a doubt, its static character contributed to the exemption of this new perspective.
But, if Niura's performance begins impassively in the purity of white and the stagnation of time, it is soon “triggered” by the entry onto the scene of five performers, female and nude. Slowly and cautiously, they begin to distribute the white plates over the large expanse of the white floor, like someone who “sets the table”, and like the painter who, in front of a blank canvas, sketches the first sketches of lines where the color will be later added. It is as if they were outlining the composition of the “drawing” of the still life, still without chromatic vivacity. But the soulful quality of the work is already in process; first, by the real-time action that the performance itself triggers, and second, by the color of human skin, which is already a dynamic factor ruminating in the silence of the white man. At this moment, Niura Bellavinha, who includes a black woman among her performers, makes direct mention of Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, a crucial work in the institution of Cubism. And we know how important the dimension of time, the issue of spatial dynamism, was for the Cubists, in addition to their enormous contribution to the effective exit of painting into real space, through collages. In this aspect, cubism is an antagonistic pole of the still life tradition. The Measure of the Impossible, therefore, leaves its first pictorial reference (the still life) and starts to allude to a second historical, modern moment (the cubist canvas), in which the fragmentation of space-time translates into movement.
It is curious, however, to think that the action of Niura's performance takes place in very slow time, almost a cinematic slow motion, and that the women work in such a way as not to break the dishes, to avoid fragmenting them. It would thus be the recognition of action, of lively movement and its unfolding over time, but opposite to the cubist process, reluctant to adhere to its speed. Furthermore, it could be useless to seek this adhesion, since we are in loco, with our body present, being able to directly access various points of view in the perception of space, something that the Cubists only tried to represent. Without a doubt, Cubism is no longer a representation of the figure, but a representation of time, that is, of the figure in time. In analytical cubism, for example, with its multiple perspectives displayed simultaneously, it is understood not exactly a movement, but an almost-flight, with a speed agile enough to cover all views. It is such an exalted representation of time that it becomes impossible, if not ideal. Time in its natural flow is different, and we see this live in performance.
The second moment of the work, the one that gives us the most immediate reference to the world of painting, is when the performers, after completely filling the floor with dishes, collect small bags (arranged on the border between the floor-table and the spectators) ) the pure red pigment with your hands. They then begin to blow the pigment over the environment, seeking to impregnate the floor, dishes, walls and their own bodies with the color. The red dust is so intense, and settles so slowly, that the air itself appears to be colored. The local architecture, the crockery and even the bodies sometimes become invisible, leaving the red cloud hovering over everything. And, by blurring the vision of real objects, the pigment released in the air assumes the status of an abstract canvas, especially that of informal abstraction, from whose affiliation Niura Bellavinha's painting itself descends. The performative action thus also ends up describing the movement within the history of art itself. However, the liquid nature of the artist's canvases replaces the aerial nature of color in the performance, as if Bellavinha always sought to compensate the chromatic intensity with the rarefaction of matter, whether in one medium or another.
The women then lie down on the plates, making body movements on this already entirely red floor, “drawing” their bodies with random marks, which could also remind us of the body paintings of Brazilian Indians, made with annatto. And they could certainly take us to the monochromatic actions of Yves Klein, especially his Anthropométries de l’époque bleu. The first public presentation of Anthropometry took place in March 1960, in Paris, when Klein placed three nude models inside a gallery, accompanied by a small orchestra, which played his composition Symphonie Monoton. The music, composed of a single tone, was heard for twenty minutes, followed by another twenty minutes of silence. And during the forty-minute duration, the models were impregnated with paint of a single color, blue, and then printed their bodies on sheets of paper placed on the floor and walls. Klein's performance, linked to the idea of painting with “living brushes”, was a logical consequence of his desire to bring the immaterial world of color to the sphere of the real, which had already made him print his hands on his shirts, and culminated in the project to illuminate the Obelisk of Place de la Concorde in blue.¹
Parallel and paradoxically to this chromatic impregnation of the material world (bodies, objects and monuments), was the thought of Yves Klein, for whom color, especially blue, was the very sublimation of flesh and matter, living energy, capable of suggest the sensation of infinite expanse. Thus, in Anthropometries, he equated the immateriality of color with the immateriality of music, seeking a formless and limitless expansion, even with and through the human body. Monochromy would be, according to Klein, the pictorial similarity of emptiness. He said:
“We will become aerial men, we will know the force of attraction towards the height, towards space, towards the void, and everything at the same time”.²
If we think about the suspension of the red powder in Niura Bellavinha's performance, the time when color, in its fleeting aerial permanence, seems to bathe the world in energy; If we think of color as this matter-space, simultaneously abstract and real, we are led to imagine this new gravitational force that Klein tells us about, which would no longer propel us towards the ground, but towards other spaces, more fluid and, for him, more spiritual.
Unlike the French artist, however, Bellavinha does not have the same cosmic vision, and does not think of monochrome as an instrument of spiritual elevation, capable of making us “feel the soul”. ³ The color choice itself is significant. For the Brazilian artist, the sensuality of color translates into erotic energy, linked to the body itself, to the earth, which is why the floor is a structuring stage for the work and not just an environmental support. Thus, the timeless emptiness of “Yves Klein blue”, which presupposes the absence of all physical limitations, is replaced by red, whose resonances are not detached from the idea of the flesh. If, on the one hand, color is pure perception, an optical phenomenon, on the other hand, it is anchored in things in the world, moving sensory instances. The performance, at least in action, during its duration, is not an image, it is a thing. And Niura's red presupposes, even in its aerial state, as dust of color, its ambivalence of space, but a space destined to “incorporate”.
Mental elevation, which is entirely detached from materiality, does not seem to be the center of Niura Bellavinha's work, even in the paintings that are presented in a drained form, washed by water jets or air pressure, procedures that are usual for her. Rather, it seems to us to be an investigation of differentiated fields of matter, or of light, more or less intense, as if explaining the transition from liquefied areas to others, saturated. Likewise, in performance, it is still the passage that matters, the material passage from one physical state to another, from air to ground, from abstract color to embodied color, as well as from white to red, and from dust to the body. Not without reason, in the series of red paintings from 2001, called Sabarás, the artist talks about the memory of red in the iron of her homeland, Minas Gerais, and the very fact that the red pigment is made up of iron matter. There is, therefore, an “earth” in this color, which can be “undermined” or expelled in temporary states of suspension or liquefaction, but which will probably return with its double face: from transparency to opacity. In the paintings, which we believe are closer to landscapes, it “rains”, leaving apparent translucent fields and dense ones.
In The Measure of the Impossible, there are also sensational moments of passage, in real movement, but when the action is completed and the red is completely deposited, there seems to be a solid ground back, an imaginary solid ground, which is reconstituted in a still life. . The action returns to the point of inertia, time freezes again, and the scene stabilizes in the total redness of the image, unifying space and things, as in Matisse's Atelier Rouge.
Ligia Canongia
june 2004
Notes
1- The concrete realization of this project only happened posthumously, in 1983, and the artist died in 1962.
2, 3 - KLEIN, Yves – cited by WEITEMEIER, Hannah in “Yves Klein”, Taschen, Cologne, 1995.