Paulo Herkenhoff, 2001 | Niura Bellavinha

Texts / Paulo Herkenhoff , New York, February 200I

NIURA BELLAVINHA, PAINTING WITH STAR BLOOD

A visit to Niura Bellavinha’s studio is like being immersed in color. The walls are covered in immense red canvases and the floor is impregnated with red pigment, fallen during pictorial work. It seems that the painting has descended into the world, the floor below, like a carpet of color. On the table, bags of very pure red, carmine, orange and pink pigments enliven the essential stage of the pictorial process to celebrate color. They claim to be the seeds for Chorar Pitangas. At first glance it seems that a red filter would have dominated the red-hot look. The chromatic temperature of the environment is on display. The look is filled with that fever that one experiences when diving into the installation Rio Vermelho, by Katie van Scherpenberg, or navigating the Desvio para o Vermelho, by Cildo Meireles. Or even penetrate the bowels of Cubocor, by Aluísio Carvão. Or, finally, it seems to reiterate that the world is the great monochrome created by Matisse in his Atelier Rouge.

This group of large, intensely red paintings are the Sabarás, with which Bellavinha provides an immersion in a chromatic environment, which may allude to the church of Nossa Senhora do Ó, in Sabará, in Minas Gerais. For Gerrnain Bazin, in his book L'Architecture Religieuse Baroque au Brésíl, this chapel in Sabará, due to its rich decoration in wooden and gold panels imitating Chinese lacquer, is among the most beautiful monuments of the Minas Gerais baroque.1 The colonial taste for the sumptuous, Arrested in the Asian luxury of Chinese lacquers with their reds and golds, it hides in Minas Gerais, in Sabará and Mariana.

"My father introduced me to this rarity [the little church of ó, in Sabará] when I was 9 years old, and at the time I didn't see it. A few years after his death I went looking to reconnect with some missing links and I was paralyzed by everything I found" , this is how Niura Bellavinha recalls her encounter with "Chineseness" in the baroque of Minas Gerais.2 Niura Bellavinha's Sabará is a city - like Zaira among Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities - that consists of the relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past "the city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it between the lines of the hand".

In the colonial period, as initially occurred in coastal cities (in Bahia and Rio de Janeiro), religious orders circulated aesthetic information between the continents. Missionaries who were in Asia before coming to Portuguese America founded a Brazilian China.3 Niura Bellavinha's "Chineseness" is of a certain order. It's a mining company's dream. It fluctuates between abstract plastic values and the personal enchantment of memory, it articulates information more as historical data than as an icon, it reduces visual information to its physical condition. Thus, a Chinese lacquer door from Macau will be space red.

Niura Bellavinha says that the Sabarás series makes references to the lacquer door from Macau, installed in the 18th century church of Nossa Senhora da Conceição, in Sabará, later imitated by a vernacular artist in the chapel of Nossa Senhora do 6, in the same city. 8In her own words, there are other facts that fascinate her, in addition to aesthetics, around the so-called Macau Gate: "it is one of the two doors that are found between the Mor Chapel and the Sacristy of the Parish Church of Nossa Senhora da Conceição, in Sabará, Minas Gerais. They are placed opposite each other. The door on the right may have been made by a craftsman from the Portuguese possession in Asia. And the door on the left is visibly a copy, by a skilled local craftsman rude. But the papers with references to its origin were destroyed in a fire. According to oral tradition, the institution of the parish was in 1 701, and until 1 71 4 it was still under construction. Furthermore, the Macao Gate could be considered one of the first Baroque pieces with Chinese influence."4

Sabará in Sabarás is an "invisible city", returned as a painting to the eye. Niura Bellavinha does not mention its topography or the specific risk of the city's buildings. However, the artist demands that her painting be seen in a dimension that incorporates urban life: "This transposition of signs from the East to Minas Gerais, miscegenation, the urban constitution of Sabará and Ouro Preto, which were two metropolises in the 17th century, They are significant considerations for my work. chromatic sensitivity in Brazil, through a unified and authoritarian model, formulated from the vernacular of the interior of the state of São Paulo. Bellavinha's work is among those that demonstrate the fragility and deficit of this persistent interpretation. Just as in the speech of Riobaldo and other characters by Guimaraes Rosa there is the diction of Dante and other greats of Western literature, the "hillbilly" cliché would not be able to account for the complex visual plan of baroque culture.6 On the other hand, the pigments used in Bellavinha's painting has a specific historical significance. The insistence on the ferrous composition of the reds points to the economic history of Minas Gerais, while its use of lacquer from China addresses cultural exchanges with the East.

Even if referring to the composition of red and blood - and except for an organic analogy - Niura Bellavinha's painting would not be "carnagao". It does not have the character of simulation as the baroque artist did through the position of a "cam" surface on the wooden sculpture "in our", nor even any sense of representation. On the contrary, Bellavinha "deembodies" painting by working with flesh-blood and, in no way, alludes to blood as an image. The baroque imaginary in Bellavinha's art questions how Clarice Lispector's reflections in the chronicle "An abstract door" about the real and the abstract instance: "From a certain point of view, I consider doing abstract things to be the least literary.

Certain pages, empty of events, give me the sensation of touching the thing itself, and it is the greatest sincerity. And as if I sculpted - what is the truest sculpture of a body? The body, the shape of the body, the expression of the body's own shape - and not the expression 'given' to the body.7

Another contemporary artist, Adriana Varejão, has worked, like Bellavinha, on the tradition of cultural exchanges between the West and the East as a question of the origin of the gaze and visual culture in Brazil. They are painters who develop a singular work, complementary in their extreme difference. Varejão articulates images from art history to constitute a critical possibility for the political understanding of the present. His work Passagem de Macau a Vila Rica creates a horizontal narrative, as in oriental scrolls. She mentions the Macau crockery and the baroque feeling in the lacquer bleeding heart. Some Brazilian churches are located in the Chinese landscape of the mountains of Minas Gerais, converted into cliffs. She knew that Guignard, dreamer of this China, drew a vertical perspective. On the route from Macau to Vila Rica, Varejão indicates how man's mental inerary seemed to grasp the world as a whole on the route of navigators, traders and missionaries.

The baroque, for Niura Bellavinha, is not necessarily imprisoned by axiological projections as irrationalist or anti-modern, as Clement Greenberg wanted, but as this field of living possibilities for modern Brazilian culture, from the architecture of Oscar Niemeyer to the art of Lygia Clark. From her childhood, the artist recalls her personal perception of Aleijadinho's work, like the childhood vision of the prophets of the Matozinhos churchyard floating in the fog that had descended over the hill. Niura Bellavinha's baroque is not constructed with iconography or by games of appearances, by any formal idea, not even by curves and sinuosities. When she talks about her experience with the Baroque since childhood, the artist deals more with her memory of the monuments than the pathology of the images. It’s difficult to think of Giles Deleuze from The Fold, Leibniz and the Baroque. This implies understanding that the folds of the soul, non-existent in the Sabarás, indicate that Bellavinha is not operating with baroque forms of affirmation of the subject. Reserving his experience of the sublime vision of the prophets, Bellavinha shares another of Lispector's words: "If I draw a door in detail on paper, and if I don't add anything of my own to it, I will be very objectively drawing an abstract door." 9

At first glance, the architectural dimension of his paintings draws attention. In Sabarás, the brushstrokes are wide, sometimes thick, always firm, vigorous, especially vertical. More than the wrist, they testify to the painter's muscle tone. The body formulates the painting. There is a bodily determination here in the direction and dimension of these architectural building brushstrokes. Being more extensive than in Amílcar de Castro's drawings, the brushstrokes in Bellavinha's painting are clearly defined by the architectural approach, as opposed to the graphic intention of this sculptor's work. Yours are engineering decisions. The Sabarás offer a dive into color, as an architectural space scaled for the viewer. They emerge in a culture that produced works such as Núcleos, by Hélio Oiticica. They are a penetrable thing to be explored with your eyes. Each brushstroke by Bellavinha is installed in the visual field with the firmness of a column supporting the gaze in the construction of the monument. These are the minimum landmarks of Bellavinha's "abstract door". There, between the brushstrokes, the eye finds passages. These are the openings in the topography of the painting, constructed by the absence or rarefaction of matter. These are gaps through which the gaze penetrates and expands, crossing the colonnade. Such doors, some made of transparency, are perhaps gaps in time. These are fissures in memory. These are his allusions to the anonymous Macau Gate and his childhood.

In Niura Bellavinha's painting, the blood red does not correspond to any leak, wound or mutilation. This painting also lacks the pathos of Guignard's sacred figures. If blood constitutes the edifying example in the Baroque and in its reappropriation by Guignard, it would be consistent to say that for Bellavinha it is pure vital and living flow. It is an element of physical composition, devoid of emotional charge and symbolic construction. It's a pure visual event. It differs from many other contemporary appropriations of Guignard, in which any green painting or painting with runoff water would be a simplistic reference to this artist. Adriana Varejão's work has developed with the problematization of the pathology of the baroque. His appropriation and inversion of baroque stylistic and rhetorical elements would not allow his painting to be reduced to the idea of citacibnism. What is consolidated is a thickness of history in these images as a possibility of establishing a critical look at the present. 10The material consciousness in Niura Bellavinha's work evokes the fact that Guignard's painting was extremely thick when he arrived in Brazil, especially in the 1930s. delicate fluid and thin painting, almost a watercolor from the following decades. A few years before moving to Minas Gerais, the landscapes of Itatiaia painted by Guignard, in the early 1940s, represent the tops of mountains, sky and meteorological phenomena. Everything seems to have the same diaphanous consistency. Since then, Guignard's imagination seems to seek heights, constructing its peaks as a world in suspension: clouds and fog, smoke from the train, Saint John's party balloons, use of vertical perspective as in Chinese art. It is a mistake to think that in Guignard's universe there would be rain or even the lightest drizzle, phenomena of water precipitation delivered to gravity. Among the works by Guignard that Niura Bellavinha particularly appreciates are the works of Itatiaia and Paisagens Imaginantes, from 1961.

If in the construction of the sublime in Guignard's painting everything rises, everything floats, the baroque also converges towards this look, despite its forms that are often considered "heavy". This is about the baroque as an argumentative form in the Counter-Reformation process. The baroque monument meant, especially in Europe, the perfect metaphor of the need for mediation by the Catholic Church between men and God.11 The Solomonic columns of the baroque temple elevated the gaze

from floor to ceiling. The only thing that falls - perhaps nothing else falls in Guignard's work - is the blood that flows, be it the redeeming blood of the scourged or crucified Christ, or the martyr's blood of Saint Sebastian, two edifying examples that are also efficient in baroque rhetoric.12Niura it is closer to this idea of matter in descent with the hanging bags of pigment in Chorar Pitanga, the copious washing in the Sabarás method and, finally, the falling matter of meteors in Translucent Paintings.

If Bellavinha's painting, at some point, could seem to evoke the Guignard of matter in suspension, it would be because his painting is done with washes, which introduces the idea of rarefaction of matter. Guignard is for Bellavinha that same painter of all-the suspension of matter-but he is also that painter of few-the precipitation of matter, like blood drained from saints and Christs. Unlike his Ouro Preto, the landscapes of Guignard's Sabará stretch across the horizon, they are not vertical. Perceiving Guignard's painting as a painting constructed by opposing physical forces opens up the possibility of facing the coexistence of antagonistic movements or different points of view. Hence Bellavinha's painting gives this strong character of place to the surface of the Sabarás. Between ambivalent movements, the work is fixed in this architecture of columns, like stakes that demarcate the here. The approach would be through the phenomenology of the space constituted in his painting. Bellavinha seems to evoke Barnett Newman and his concerns about painting, the body and perception. At this point, the process of perception resorts to verticality as a reference - neither the fall of an angel or a meteor, nor the sublimated suspension of the baroque gaze. Niura Bellavinha's painting, escaping geometrism and the metaphysics of form, seeks some possible stability for the look.

In the 20th century, there was an artistic transit between Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais in the visual arts. Coming from Rio, Oscar Niemeyer and Portinari, in Pampulha, or Guignard, in art teaching, consolidated the modern vocation in Minas Gerais. Lygia Clark and Amílcar de Castro from Minas Gerais found the conditions in the Rio environment to formulate a work within the process and premises that are formulated in neoconcretism, of which they are fundamental agents. 13 In this historical arc, it passes from Sabará to the 86/ides of Oiticica through the painting of Bellavinha. The baroque monument nestled in the mountains of Minas, which in the 20th century reverted to a painting by Guignard, returns to the coast in Sabarás and in the symbolic form of "pitanga", which, being a low-lying bush typical of coastal sandy soil, becomes a metaphor for the arrival at the Rio de Janeiro, as access to the coast and other light.

In Chorar Pitangas, Niura Bellavinha recovers the empty pigment bags, organizing them vertically in orders. She converts the remains of lost color packaging into art. The artist inflicts on the waste of her work as a painter something like an ultimate destiny, fulfilling part of it in the realization of the eschatological sentence: all matter in the world in the hands of an artist can be converted into art. The colors, always warm, result from the impregnation of the pigment contained in the plastic bags. They are like intensely red clusters of ripe fruit. Bellavinha appropriates the popular expression, "chorar pitanga", which now means crying red, bloody tears. It has something of the red flow that flows when water jets are washed from the Sabarás screens. "The idea is to make this cascade, this structure coming from the teat to the floor", says the artist.14 "Crying pitangas" is asking insistently, whining, for something that is denied, or, in the case of Bellavinha's work, something that it no longer exists except as a memory and residue of pure color.

The color of these pigments, in their virginity, indicates how the Sabarás palette, although setting in motion the consciousness of the baroque, has its eyes on the torrid, hot, strident ranges of Núcleos (1960), by Hélio Oiticica. In its rawness, it belongs to the radical order of Bólides, by Oiticica, a stage of his art as an adventure of color. In Bólides, color finds its body to indulge in multiple games of perception, such as touch and smell. The material that Chorar Pitangas is composed of can more precisely evoke Oiticica from Bólide Caixa 18 Homenagem a Cara de Cavalo (1966). In this work, the red bag of pure pigment is an allegory of social exclusion and order violence, through the body of the marginal killed by the police, reduced to the same condition of "living mud" as Mineirinho, another robber, in Clarice Lispector's chronicle . Oiticica's radical work constitutes an ethical monument of Brazilian art and the extreme point of painting in Western art. Like a Bólide, the question of Chorar Pitangas, however, remains pictorial. In this sense, the work would primarily be a kind of dry painting, without a brush, with absolute economy in method.

'I start with a dense mass of paint and then open grooves with a jet of water or compressed air. I end up working contrary to the tradition of painting, because I remove the painting that is there", explains the artist, "my story was to reduce. Not chromatically, but in matter.15 The temptation is to say that Niura Bellavinha does not paint "red". It seems not to investigate a color. The temptation would be to say that the Sabarás universe is not monochromatic, because there is not even a reference to a palette from which a governing color could be chosen or deduced.

The painter does not use white paint. The white that appears is light originating from the screen. The saturation of these pigments under the action of water causes blue veins to emerge, like arteries visible under the skin. However, Niura Bellavinha vehemently reiterates that 'red comes from iron', and then concludes

saying that iron, in turn, is part of the composition of the blood. What you see, therefore, embodied in this studio is not red, but iron. Because the artist talks about the matter of the world more than about color. Her painting, in physical terms, is placed in the mineral family of Amílcar de Castro's sculpture and in the painting of certain Daniel Senise and José Bechara, precisely artists with whom she has no formal relationship. In her painting, what runs alludes to blood and her vehicle could be a kind of plasma. This matter - pigment and blood - can also be ore. Hematite and specularite, mixed with meteor dust, contain ferrous elements. Etymologically, hematite and red blood cells are linked by the root linked to iron.

In this exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Niura Bellavinha shows three sets of works (Sabarás, Pinturas Translúcidas and Chorar Pitangas), in which she operates with a sense of architecture, revealed in multiple constructive solutions. The three-dimensionality of the painting goes beyond transparency, an element that formulates the topography of the image as a territory to be penetrated by the gaze. In Sabarás, the pictorial field gains another meaning as a three-dimensional space through the leafing of the plane to be painted. Roughly speaking, the idea of foliating the plane is on the eve of neoconcretism in Lygia Clark's Contra-reliefs and Hélio Oiticica's Bilaterals and Spatial Reliefs, or in the black holes in Anna Maria Maiolino's drawings, in the 70s. In this tradition, Bellavinha's painting is unique in the instance of procedures by superimposing two canvases that are worked on simultaneously through the same pictorial acts. Consequently, the Sabarás must be exposed in pairs - not as diptychs, but side by side, as unfaithful doubles.

Bellavinha's Translucent Paintings achieve the character of constructing three-dimensional spaces, and can become a true quadrilateral room formed by transparent silk screens, as in Alma. Transparency and openings allow the artist to incorporate the space behind the canvas into the structure of the work, like the veiled image seen in Ele Passou, or the space of writing seen in Alma.

In turn, Chorar Pitangas is a set of empty plastic bags, used for pigment. The bags are intensely impregnated with color as a memory of the vessel that once contained the primordial powder of the pigment before its dispersion on the canvas in the pictorial process.

The Sabarás involved the development of a process that comprises two overlapping canvases, to be painted simultaneously. Bellavinha paints directly on the first, which allows the color to filter into the second. The top canvas is therefore painted visually, like alluvial gold. The second canvas would be a kind of "blind painting", since being under the first, it collects the excesses, the unabsorbed and what is filtered. If the first screen is the visible surface, the second would be a geological layer explained by a stratigraphic look. The back screen is a memory, there is something that is buried under a geological layer (the first screen}, like underground gold.

The paintings "behind" - the second screen - are not ghosts, mirrors or reproductions of the first. There is an economic and physical game in them. Nothing that resembles the process of stamping, material transfer or printing with an gravure matrix. In some cases, Bellavinha moves the second canvas, when the painting seems faint, needs another temperature or reaches the realization of some architectural plan. The first painting is done starting from the excess, by extracting the leftovers and eliminating the unnecessary. The back painting collects the leftovers and with it seeks to become viable as a painting, more than as an image. In the first painting, made in sight or under sight, one can see the conduct of the method, its realization in painting. In the back painting, there is chance that is initially more due to blindness, or pseudoblindness, since something is known and intentionality pre-exists, but one still notices the movement of liquids, their mechanics, fluid dynamics or the deposit, settlement of matter . Something that is announced as archaeological strata. "I don't worry about what's behind, on the second canvas. I even forget. I want the element of surprise. As the mystery builds, I feel like it's time to stop."16 In terms of painting As a type of blood action, Bellavinha is more interested in the circulation of blood than in its coagulation. This is also the meaning of history as it infiltrates her work, like a substance that circulates and gives thickness to the present.

The lands of Minas Gerais are also known as chromatically rich. The region's ferrous pigments gave the earthy accent to Master Manuel da Costa Ataíde's palette in the region's baroque churches. Since the second post-war period, many painters have used pigments made from land in Minas Gerais, such as Frans Krajcberg, the pioneer, Manfredo de Souzanetto, Katie van Scherpenberg, Niura Bellavinha and others. The known origin of the refined pigment imbues the painting with a certain notion of place and a historical tradition of color, converting soil into landscape. The diversity of Niura Bellavinha's painting method also allows comparison with a mining model.

In the regency of its mineralogy, Niura Bellavinha's exhibition presents two sparks. Among the meanings of "spark", in Aurélio, are "(a) particle that jumps from a falling substance or in friction with another body and (b) gold reed that is lost in the earth or mine sands". In the first case , in He Passed, the sparks in the eyes are produced by the glow of the pigment made from meteor dust. This stellar glow in the night field is made with sparks similar to those glimpsed when looking at a falling celestial body in the sky. The Sabarás constitute the second possibility . His pictorial action will be something that is more precisely classified as referring to the mining activity of sparking. In Aurélio, sparking is "looking for sparks of gold, or looking for diamonds, in lands that have previously been worked". Thus, Bellavinha's work is pure sparking on the second canvas already stained with leftover color from the first. The artist's action consists of searching in the traces of iron-pigment-color for something that could be recovered as painting, from something that was lost on the surface of the first canvas after being washed .

In this kind of spark, the two thin linen screens in each pair of Sabarás have the physical functions of different mining work instruments. Here, painting is referring to the material culture in this work. The woven structure of the linen, exactly the same in both fabrics, will have different mining functions. The first screen is a sieve, the second screen is a sieve. Bellavinha's painting is a kind of mining wash, mining the pictorial color hidden and sheltered within the pure, dry pigment, sometimes Minas Gerais soil.

Initially, Niura Bellavinha applies the pigment to the canvas for the sparkling wash. The first screen is washed with a water jet and compressed air. In Aurélio, washing is "the separation by means of water of the useful parts of an ore", or even, in Lavras Diamantinas, the already disturbed gravel, which is found in poorly worked mines. A sieve, in Aurélio, is an "object, generally circular, with a wooden or metal frame, with a bottom made of braided threads, canvas, bamboo, horsehair or metal, and used to separate substances reduced to fragments (ground, crushed, crushed, etc.), retaining the thick parts". Thus, the painting on the front is a kind of filter, a sieve, which, in the pictorial method of water jet washing, allows paint and small traces of fragments to pass through, but will retain matter on its surface to be looked at or will allow it to escape until the artist defines her action on her as completed. The action in the second screen requires Aurélio to describe a pan: "a wooden trough used to wash gold sand or diamond gravel". The second, being a screen, collects what had previously passed through the screen. The sieved color, the result of the distribution of what passes and does not pass through the sieve screen, will be mined by the battery.

If each Sabarás canvas embodies its own event, however, a painting by Bellavinha cannot, paradoxically, include the entirety of the event, since in his painting process, in the "second canvas", there is something that is not there, that escaped of painting. When she paints or talks about painting, the artist articulates the idea of the color red as iron in the Sabarás or the meteorite in the Translucent Paintings. To the detriment of the iconic character of the image, its painting affirms the surface as a concrete place of the trace of the referent and the real, be it iron as iron, or meteor dust as the concrete presence of the asteroid. If he passed, his trace is light in the memory.

The painter bought two pieces of meteors, one that fell in Texas and the other in China. She macerated meteor fragments to turn them into pigment. As in the red pigments of the Sabarás, a large part of the composition of meteors is also iron. Furthermore, the painter added hematite and specularite to this meteor powder, with which she would make the Translucent Paintings. The touches of light, hints of stars, perhaps one of them would have illuminated the sky of Guignard one day.17

In the tradition of Brazilian painting, this "dark light" in Bellavinha's work emerges from black surfaces, it is one of the characteristics of the painting of the neoconcretist period by Hercules Barsotti. A movement of the spectator there, as here, makes the dark surface shine in small points, like stars.

Among the Translucent Paintings, He Passed is a tribute to a brother who died at the age of 14. Shortly before he died, he had drawn a hand pointing to a comet on a window pane. He Passed is a set of seven painted transparent silk canvases. In serial paintings, the viewer often has to find his place in the visual territory to carry out his game of space and temporal course. The chassis of Ele Passou's paintings are made of iron, forming a relationship between the rigidity of the structuring bones and the transparency of the supporting epidermis. A black stripe occupies the central part of the first chassis, the right half of the second, a third of the third, and the fourth, the central screen, has not been touched. In a symmetrical and opposite way, the structure is repeated from the fifth to the seventh. The light reaches the center and is lost as his gaze moves to the left or right. The movement witnesses a body falling from the sky. In the black areas, meteor dust and specularite shine. The movement constructed by the set of paintings resembles a graphic representation of the movements of stars or functions as a diagram of the daily "movement" of the sun, as empirically perceived, during the course of the day.

This painting by Bellavinha refers to a movement that occurred in the vault. celestial, the trajectory of the star in the firmament. In this sense, He Passed, even if arranged on a straight wall, would describe a curve, that of the movement of the sun as seen daily in the celestial vault. If something or someone passes by, it is guided by our gaze. The central panel of He Passed would be the zenith of this look. Under its transparency, you can see that glass painted by your brother, illuminated. There is something that defends itself here from the opacity of the world. It is the place of memory, of the recorded dream, of the impossibility of forgetting, which is what Gianni Vattimo is all about.

Bellavinha's serial painting refers to the structure of The Fall of Icarus (1980), by Katie van Scherpenberg, on a theme by Pieter Breughel the Elder,18 and to man's wildest dreams. A work by Niura Bellavinha embodies the "painting" event, being able to transmit into the future the physical effort (the pictorial clash) in space as sensations offered to perception from complex material operations. Thus, she can poetically reconvert a meteor into a star. If your painting is architecture, however, it is worth calling upon the thoughts of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who say that "the monument does not update the virtual event, but incorporates it or incarnates it: it gives it a body, a life, a universe (...) These universes are neither virtual nor actual, they are possible, the possible as an aesthetic category."19

In contrast, in Translucent Paintings, Niura Bellavinha pursues her Mallamersian question of making the impossible possible: painting with starlight.

Paulo Herkenhoff

February 2001

Notes

1 Paris, Ubrairic Plon. 1956, lathe 11, p. 102.

2 Letter to the author on February 3, 2CXJ1.

3 The subject was studied by the author in 'Varejão: A China within Brazil', in 1/Varejão, AmslOrdam, Galeria Barbara Farber, 1992.

4 Op. cit. note 2 above. The artist claims to have included this information in Initiação ao baroco from Minas Gerais. by Afonso Avita, with collaboration by Cnslina Ávila São Paulo. Nobel, 19H4, pp. 54 c 55.

5 Interview with author by telephone on February 2, 2001.

6 I thank Hoctor Ollea for access to his lecture on Guimaraes Rosa defended at the University of Texas, in Austin.

7 In Not to forget. Rio de Janeiro, Rocco, 1999, p. 103. The artist mentioned to the author the importance of this text by Lispector in sou procosso.

8 "Heview of a GroJo Exhioilio'l atlhe Art of This Ce'ltury Galery, a-1d of Mara Martins a'ld Luis Outntanlha' (194), in Perceptions wxJ Judgments 1939- 1940, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press. 1986. v. I, p.210.

9 Op. cn. note I above. P. 103.

l Excerpt from the author taken from "Varejão: A China within Brazil", op. cit. note 3 above.

11 Giulio Cario Argan. The Baroque Age. New York, Rizzo11, 1989.

12 In an interview with the author on January 23, 2001, Bellavinha reaffirms that his large paintings with eyes, from the Insônia series, were a tribute to Guignard and his Cristas.

13 See by the author "Lygia Clark's panar adventure- de snails, etJcadas and Caminhando' in Lyga Clark.São Paulo, Museu de Arte

Moderna, 1999, pp. 1 -65.

14 Op. cit.. note 1? above..

15 tb.dem.

16 Ibdem.

17 The author lauds the accuracy of the astronomical description of the nature of meteors. to maintain the stellar character of its light according to poetic and empirical perception.

18 In this work, made up of four panels, in each one there is a collage of fabric in the same way, always in the same position, with a black horizontal line that goes down. In the last screen, the collage is below this horizon line. Icarus fell into the sea, falling into the flow of our gaze.

19 What is philosophy? Rio de Janeiro, Editora 3o1, 19<J2, p. 229 230.