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​Texts / Maria Hirszman, 2002

Niura Bellavinha's sensory dive

​​

'Pintura Seca' dialogues with the baroque and the most recent contemporary production

Niura Bellavinha, exhibiting at Galeria Nara Roesler: colorful air.

The exhibition Pintura Seca, which Niura Bellavinha shows at Galeria Nara Roesler, is part of Brazilian artistic history, proposing, through a few elements, a sensorial immersion and a visual dialogue with one of the most solid cultural traditions in the country: Baroque art. These works were born from the research carried out by the Minas Gerais artist with pigments from China, in an attempt to investigate the East/West relationship created thanks to the Catholic religious who established the bridge between two colonies of Portugal: Brazil and Macau. This relationship is witnessed in several works present in the historic cities of Minas, such as the doors of the Church of Nossa Senhora do Ó, a small church in Sabará, Niura's birthplace.

The desire to deal with this baroque repertoire is something that has long surrounded Niura's work. She even claims that it was always present in her work, only she couldn't see it. "I had it, I talked about it, but I wasn't aware of it," she explains. The visitor should not, however, expect a mere recovery of the colonial school's repertoire, its formal structure or its basic elements. "I didn't want a paraphrase, I really wanted to promote a dip in the Baroque", explains the artist.

Upon entering the environment in shades of red, pink and orange, built from the composition of the bags that transported pigments from China to Brazil (which the artist initially arranged at random on the walls of her studio, until realizing that there was an interesting composition there to be investigated) she is not quoting the past, but building a space that dialogues with several generations of contemporary Brazilian artists who have explored this relationship between space and color, such as Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Cildo Meireles and Fernando Bento.

The almost casual appropriation of plastic packaging, used to cover the walls or as raw material for the production of "paintings" that the artist calls blankets is also related to the revaluation of such a less noble material through careful production, such as the one made by Jarbas Lopes.

The floor is also made of plastic and is also colored, in a strong orange tone reminiscent of annatto.

Feminine - A third key to the reading of Niura's work, which is not content with just following one clue and prefers to add a series of investigations into the same work, is the issue of the feminine. The power of the red color, reinforced by the image of the bags as if they were full of pigment and that also resemble bags of spice, as well as the relationship between the bags on the wall and the patchwork quilts, take the idea of ​​the feminine to paroxysm.

In fact, as a good tributary to the Baroque, Niura is not afraid of excess. Everything vibrates in her installation and after a few minutes inside her it feels like our senses are being altered. The use of red is one of the main reasons for this pulsation sensation, since the transmission wave of this color is quite accelerated, much higher than that of blue, for example, usually associated with tranquility and even depression. "At night we have the impression that even the air is colored", explains Niura.

The question of rhythm and time lead the artist to affirm that her work is actually rhythm and chromatic pulsation. So it's music. But when it comes to defining the work from one of the senses, it is neither vision nor hearing that stand out. "It's a painting to eat", she says, stressing the importance of the spice markets she found in Rio, the city where she has lived for five years, for the production of Pintura Seca.

Biographical and incidental issues are of great importance in Niura's work. The works are born from each other and always adding new elements. The exhibition on display at the moment, for example, did not even exist a month ago. After participating in a lightning event with a similar installation during the period of the Bienal de São Paulo, Niura had a great public impact and decided to accept the challenge, once again transforming the space into painting, the color into vibration.

Maria Hirszman

2002

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