Texts / Paulo Herkenhoff, 2016
Paulo Herkenhoff
INTRODUCTION
To consider the broad and profound dimension of Niura Bellavinha’s painting requires developing a transversal view of history and of artistic means, understanding that the linguistic flow of art always converges toward the artist’s expanded painting project over three decades—displaced from the condition of object toward the activation of semantic processes and the polysemization of the sign. This essay is characterized by a constellation of arguments, not necessarily concatenated by the stylemes of water and iron oxide, by any logical rationale within the vocabulary of mining, for critical discourse pursues the spark of ideas, the availability of gazes before the hypotheses prompted by this art. On a phenomenological dimension, the text seeks to apprehend the scintillations emerging from Niura Bellavinha’s painting. The expansion of painting within this corpus proposes a complex trajectory through history, traditions, and possibilities.
What is practiced is an ars pictorica of deviations formulated by the brush, by buckets of water, bodies, video cameras, meteorites, a photographic camera, kites, and other means. To this day, the work produced constitutes an incessant expansion of the sign of painting through several limit-experiences: the drip as brushstroke, a shooting star as pigment, a surface of water as painting support. The work is a vast essay of errant visibility. This text cuts transversely through the painting to extract singularities and differentiate similitudes, to juxtapose traditions and experiments.
One perspective of Niura Bellavinha’s work resides in the polysemy of water and not in its reduction to a styleme. A styleme would refer to an invariant trait of a style, as Luiz Carlos Costa Lima states. Under a regime of semantic variance, water assumes a multiplicity of tasks and qualities: specular water, lens water, dissipating water, igneous water, diluting water, signifying water, meaning-water, semantic water, logical water, among others, within the flow of pictorial language. This water, singular and multiple, leads to Gaston Bachelard and Clarice Lispector, to Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Luce Irigaray, to Zygmunt Bauman and João Guimarães Rosa. Likewise, the understanding of the painter Niura Bellavinha leads one to think of other artists of her generation, such as Caetano de Almeida, Ana Horta, Daniel Senise, or Adriana Varejão. Can the analysis of certain scopic regimes ignore that gender conditions the production, social circulation, and economic appropriation of painting? In the face of art as capital investment, does using video projection on the canvas as the conclusion of the pictorial process—or applying meteor dust as pigment—add to or detract from the value of the painting?
The body and its absence, slowness and repetition, the investment of desire, the accumulation of capital, the work regime, and waiting are motors and temporalities that trip like the stone in Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s anthropophagic poem “No meio do caminho” (1928). “[...] In the middle of the road there was a stone./ I shall never forget this event/ In the life of my so-weary retinas./ I shall never forget that in the middle of the road/ There was a stone. [...]” A task of culture in Brazil is to construct the poetics of the stone, as in the set of twelve soapstone statues of prophets in the forecourt of the Santuário do Senhor Bom Jesus de Matosinhos, in the sacred mount of Congonhas, MG (1800–1805). Painters such as Manuel da Costa Ataíde (1762–1830), Alberto da Veiga Guignard (1896–1962), Frans Krajcberg, Manfredo de Souzanetto, Niura Bellavinha, and Carlos Vergara extracted color from stones and soil. For them, the question lies in unearthing the painting latent within the stone, awaiting the painter. This overturns Michelangelo’s statement that painting is per via di porre, since it adds matter, while sculpture is per via di levare, as it removes matter. Therefore, the stone does not contain the body of David or any other three-dimensional figure, as it did for Michelangelo, but instead contains the color-surface seized from the landscape and soil. Because this painting is necessary to the definition of code and pictorial sign from Minas Gerais over a two-century cycle, it is also ipso facto necessary to the understanding of the painting’s own untimeliness in Brazil.
GENEALOGY
“I was 13 years old. I was taking the Free Course at the Guignard School, drawing. During a snack break, I stopped at the door of the classroom where Amilcar [de Castro] was teaching Bi-Tri. I stood watching; he invited me in. He asked the students to lend paper, ink, and brush.
At the end of his explanation, he asked everyone for a point and a line: I dipped the brush in the pot and, with a swift movement, fulfilled his request. [...] He invited me to attend his classes. And he told me that I, if I wanted, should continue and pursue my education in art! A few years passed, already taking the undergraduate course, he advised me to keep attending his classes and suggested that I rent a place for a studio outside my home. ‘Art is not made in school; here is good for making contacts, building relationships...,’ he said. The following year, he invited me to his Advanced Art Nucleus.
At the end of the 1980s, I began washing the paintings, as I said—I wanted to wash away ‘influences,’ I sought an authorial painting... He said: ‘Guignard used to wash his canvases with turpentine.’ And he told me that my paintings seemed to follow what Guignard had begun. He added that the white without white paint, the white that ‘looks like light,’ that is the raw canvas, had to do with Guignard’s drawings and some of his paintings... I said—and he agreed—that the raw canvas white related to engraving, photography, radiography, and especially cinema, where white is light,” Niura Bellavinha recounts.
The turpentine bath would already appear in canvases such as Noites de São João, populated by balloons, in which the thinned paint renders the materiality of the most solid mountain and the most tenuous, fading mist ambivalent. All of painting’s effort is to keep the world in a state of suspension.
The expanded situacionism of recent decades greatly facilitates the lives of artists in appropriating ideas and visual solutions of their predecessors. Even so, many frequently strive to consolidate or clarify some genealogy and obliterate more striking influences as strategies to assert authenticity and personal invention. This syndrome encompasses the fear of accusations of plagiarism, pastiche, simulacrum, counterfeiting, or copying—or of being seen as derivative, imitative, or belated. In other cases, it is the pursuit of forging a prestigious and legitimizing lineage, as if teachers had the power to convert students into artists. Two historical cases of geometric abstraction in Brazil elucidate this subject, with differing positions.
Lygia Clark, who studied in Paris with the celebrated Fernand Léger (1881–1955), assessed that her best teacher, however, was the obscure Isaac Dobrinsky (1891–1973): “I had Fernand Léger and Dobrinsky as teachers, and of the two, he was the less accomplished artist but the greatest teacher I had.” Sculptor Sergio Camargo, meanwhile, staged a consistent formation while concealing that his time at the Altamira Academy in Buenos Aires occurred during an extremely conservative period of Lucio Fontana in the 1940s. He also began omitting that his period in Paris, in the early following decade, consisted in fact of studies with the conservative Emmanuel Auricoste (1908–1995), as a continuation of the inadequate training with Fontana. In Art et technique au XIXe et XXe siècles (1956), Pierre Francastel—whom Camargo studied with in Paris in 1961—summarizes the importance of modern sculpture around Constantin Brancusi (1876–1957) and Henri Laurens (1885–1954). Camargo then began citing them in his résumé as encounters and influences, removing references to Auricoste in a clear tactical maneuver of self-valorization through mechanisms of sanctioned prestige. When Ferreira Gullar and the Neo-Concretists assumed the fundamental references of Kazimir Malevich (1878–1935), Piet Mondrian (1872–1944), and Josef Albers (1888–1976), Lygia Clark (1920–1988) wrote an imaginary Letter to Mondrian in May 1959, proclaiming: “You already know that I continue your problem, which is painful,” yet without piggybacking on it.
Bellavinha’s previously cited account leads to literary critic Harold Bloom, who addressed something similar to Camargo’s syndrome in The Anxiety of Influence (1973) and, in the preface to the second edition, revises certain ideas and introduces the notion of poetic misprision, the consequence of misreading at the basis of artistic anxiety. This creative unproductiveness or despotentiation of invention approaches melancholy and social dystopia.
During the period of fierce authorial competition between Picasso and Braque in the 1910s, they sometimes marked the exact day of execution on their works, for indicating only the year could jeopardize the authorial primacy of their inventions. In an expressive field where works are massively produced by individual authorship (and not in pairs or groups), the visual arts are the terrain of the subject with exposed nerves and personal exposure, of direct competition in the market for prices and space in magazines and for prestige in exhibitions in galleries and museums, with a visible confrontation in the definition of exchange value in the social field of fetish and the place occupied by Narcissus.
Here, Bloom refutes an Oedipal–Freudian rivalry.
There are frequent processes of repression of the artist-subject and the exclusion of other artists, as a sort of attempt at cultural homicide. Psychoanalyst Eduardo Mascarenhas concluded that “culture indirectly reverberates on the body, determining accident or balance, health or illness, and in extreme cases, life or death,” a thesis of cultural assassination endorsed by Glauber Rocha (1939–1981). This crisis concerns a profound affectation of how the artist perceives their own constitution on the plane of individuality and subjectivity within the art system. And soon, their own production may be affected.
A dialogue of magnitudes exists between the diminutive abstract washes of Guignard (Untitled, 11.0 × 13.2 cm and 6.8 × 6.7 cm, Museum of Art of Rio – MAR Collection), certain geometric–gestural drawings by his student Amilcar de Castro made with wide brushes and paintbrushes (e.g., Untitled, 1975, 47.8 × 65.5 cm), and a certain aqueous painting of Niura Bellavinha (Transformador, 2006, MAR), through a dissonant mechanics of fluids. In Guignard, mastery of the diminutive field results in a dimensional inversion of amplitude and vastness extracted from a small space; in Amilcar, space is an act of synthesis and speed, oriented by intuitive reason, economy of gesture, and restraint; and in Bellavinha, as abundance and expansion. If “Genealogy” is the title of this chapter, it might also well be “Guignard’s Granddaughter.” The main point now is no longer the transcribed version of origin but the effort of individuation by the painter Niura Bellavinha, which seems once more to demand recourse to the genderless voice of Clarice Lispector’s Água viva: “I paint as an exercise of myself.”
IMMERSED HUMAN
The etymology of immerse and submerge indicates that both come from fourteenth-century French, from Latin mergere, and further back from Sanskrit maji, already appearing in Montaigne (“in other times, they were submerged by the flood of celestial waters.” Montaigne, II, 335). In all its variants, it refers to sinking, plunging into water or another liquid. In many languages, water evokes onomatopoeias such as plonger, splash, affondare, borbujas, Blase, igarapé, and cataract, or, in art, Humano imerso (Immersed Human). In the existence of each subject, Immersed Human is the embryo and the fetus in its place in the womb. Therefore, these paintings are about the intimate immensity where a grave silence now resounds. It simultaneously updates as the surface and the depth of a being imagined in a state of corporeal rarefaction and psychic condensation. Bellavinha accumulated states of aqueous matter—atmospheric, liquid, and fluid—or their approximations to Gaston Bachelard’s psychoanalysis of water, Turner’s aqueous state of the world, Zygmunt Bauman’s liquidity of modern life, and Luce Irigaray’s mechanics of fluids in the conceptual reconfiguration of the feminine.
The perspective of Immersed Human, which young Niura Bellavinha inaugurates in 1991, implies the intuition of a liquid dynamic in which the subject submerges. With due caution between the arguments, this series of paintings would be, in a certain intuitive sense, a prelude to Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of liquidity. “Liquid life is a form of life that tends to be carried on in a liquid-modern society. Liquid-modern is a society in which the conditions under which its members act change in a shorter time than that required for the consolidation, in habits and routines, of forms of action,” Bauman argues in Liquid Life. “In short: liquid life is a precarious life, lived under conditions of constant uncertainty.” Immersed Human seems to propose a space of another consciousness and velocity of existence, parallel to Bauman’s lamentations in Liquid Life (2005).
One intuits, in the canvases, that Immersed Human is what territorializes immersion within the indivisible particularity of the soul folded in Leibniz, in fantasies of infinite plunging, descent into chaos, ghostly emergence, and knowledge of the abyss—perhaps the shallowest condition in this topology. Without acts of theatricality, Dantean circles, or vanishing perspectives, the space does not simulate proposing inhumane abyssal images, cosmic magnitudes, or unattainable fantasy spaces of insurmountable nyctophobic terror. It is here, within the human measure of the possible phantasmatic of the primal aqueous and the perennial deep, without etiological reveries through art. Perhaps the best introduction to Bellavinha’s liquid corpus, in relation to Bachelard’s psychoanalysis of reverie in Water and Dreams (1942), is not the idea of infinity found in waters but that of depth. Immersed Human aspires to be as pictorial and fleeting as the Zen space-time unfolded in a blind painting by Tomie Ohtake.
An imagery of Edgar Allan Poe contaminates the analysis of Bellavinha’s liquid territories throughout her trajectory. In Poe’s poetry, “the destinies of water images follow with great exactitude the destiny of the principal imaginary, which is the reverie of death; and all water originally clear is ‘a water that must darken, a water that will absorb black suffering,’” warns Bachelard. “All living water is a water that is about to die.” The psychoanalysis of the water element results from the very idea of the human immersed; it proliferates from the difficult delights of the Floating Garden, because the Immersed Human faces the inescapable reality of death, this being the locus of nascent life. All of Bachelard’s phenomenology of water converges on the conclusion that matter unveils thought. If water is feminine in his philosophy—but only when a duel of malice begins between man and waves—“water assumes a rancor, changes sex. Becoming evil, it becomes masculine,” states Bachelard in Water and Dreams. It is then that the painting’s title reiterates the masculine gender of the water in The Unfaithful / Nocturnal Garden (1992).
A watercolor by Turner, The Mewstone, records the rock and its stormy waters in the bay of Wembury, in Devon, on the southeastern route of Plymouth Sound—a region the artist visited in 1813. The harmonious aesthetics exacerbate the dramatic struggle between the mechanics of fluids and the mechanics of solids. Turner painted natural elements with the ferocity of the agitated seas of seventeenth-century Dutch painters and with the minutiae of a terrible, rancorous water akin to Bachelard’s malignant water. It is when he inhabits the errancy between imagination and reality. Turner knew that the immediacy of experience and the radical confrontation between the sublime and the terrible were essential to devastate the stabilized vision of landscape. In Bellavinha, place emerges between the telluric and the aqueous as a capture of the force of a nature hidden beneath the surface of painting. At the threshold of her trajectory, the canvas Submerged Garden (1995), following the Immersed Humans, does not aim at contemplating Turner’s liquid sublime, but instead settles into a territory where pictorial liquid rests as a refuge for the gaze under a palette contained in nuances and with the absence of any face.
Niura Bellavinha’s work has positioned itself as a relationship interweaving a focus now on water, now on earth—covered by the physics of fluid mechanics and solid mechanics—exposing the imaginary between the vulvar and the phallic, between liquidity and solidity, between man and woman. The symbolism of water is feminine, as frequently announced in the twentieth century. Here arises a first shift toward understanding the mechanics of matter in Immersed Human. For Luce Irigaray, in Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un (This Sex Which Is Not One), beyond this assertion, it is necessary to rethink the very concept of the feminine in a different manner that deconstructs Freudian theory of femininity and is not its inverse, negative, or complement to man. In Irigaray’s thesis, woman emits the fluent, the floating, the fluctuating as a way of thinking the structure of the subject and its inscription in the social order and in the logic of capitalism. Irigaray then proposes reexamining the economy of women’s pleasure and the model of the feminine as a mechanics of fluids—from which the economy of sperm (due to fear of castration and rationality in the mechanics of solids, it is never placed among bodily fluids such as blood, sweat, menstruation, or urine) has always been excluded. Immersed Human opts for the mechanics of fluids over the mechanics of solids. The thinker proposes rethinking “this sex which is not one,” in an attack on the persistence of a “semantics of incomplete beings.”
How to transform fluidity—given as a condition of devaluation—into potency? In This Sex Which Is Not One, Irigaray argues that fluidity marks the radical alterity of the feminine and from it extracts strategic conditions to enable an emancipatory feminine imaginary. For the artist Carol Armstrong, an attentive reader of Irigaray, water represents fluidity in its condition as the Other before solidified reality. It is on this axis of selection—female/male—that her photographic poetics orchestrate, through metonymy, the encounter of water and earth. In this series of Bellavinha’s paintings, greys and browns appear as earthy tones adjusted to the aqueous field as the essential anatomy of the human. Armstrong and Bellavinha converge toward an aesthetics of sexual difference. In this same ethical field, Carrie Mae Weems, Adrian Piper, Lorna Simpson, and Kara Walker in the United States, and Maria Lidia Mariani and Rosana Paulino in Brazil, assume an additional emancipatory responsibility in their ethics in the face of racist violence against Afro-descendant women in post-colonialism. The language in Clarice Lispector’s Água viva (1973)—the Brazilian writer forged in the errancy of Jewishness—is enunciated by a being without gender to destabilize the consciousness of any subject, no matter who, immersed in fluidity.
SABARÁS
The intense red of the Sabarás enables immersion into a chromatic environment that alludes to the chapel of Nossa Senhora do Ó in Sabará, which Germain Bazin ranked—due to its decoration of wooden panels and gold imitating Chinese lacquer—among the most beautiful monuments of the Baroque in Minas Gerais. “My father introduced me to this rarity when I was nine years old, and at the time I didn’t see it. A few years after his death, I began trying to reconnect some lost links and found myself paralyzed before everything I encountered,” the artist recalls of her encounter with the “chinoiseries.” This Sabará is the place—as is Zaira in Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino—of the relations between the measures of its space and its past events: “the city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand.” In Bahia and Rio, coastal colonial cities, religious orders circulated information between continents; missionaries coming from Asia to Portuguese America invented a “Brazilian China.” “The transposition of signs from the Orient—mainly from Goa—to Minas Gerais, and the urban formation of Sabará and Ouro Preto, two metropolises in the eighteenth century, are significant considerations for my work.” Bellavinha’s chinoiserie is a miner’s dream between plastic values and memory that transfigures the visible into matter. This painting retrieves the Baroque from the rural register of cor caipira and exposes the fragility of that interpretation. Thus, just as in Riobaldo’s speech, when Guimarães Rosa cites Dante and other greats, the rustic cliché cannot account for the complexity of Baroque culture. The Sabarás series is grounded in the lacquer door from Macau installed in the Church of Nossa Senhora da Conceição in Sabará, soon imitated in the chapel of Nossa Senhora do Ó. According to Bellavinha, the original Macau door, the one on the right, “may have been produced by an artisan coming from the Portuguese possession in Asia. And the door on the left is visibly a copy, made by a local artisan of rough skill. But the documents referring to its origin were destroyed in a fire. According to oral tradition, the parish was established in 1701, and until 1714 it was still under construction. Moreover, the Macau door may be considered one of the first Baroque works with Chinese influence.”
The pigments used by Bellavinha possess undeniable historical pregnance. Even when associated with the composition of red and blood—and aside from an analogy of organic nature—this painting would not be carnação, since it does not operate through simulation as Baroque art did, by applying a “skin” surface over the wooden sculpture “in the bone.” On the contrary, Bellavinha “de-skins” the painting: she works with flesh-blood, but never alludes to the image of blood. Nothing evokes dripping, wounds, or mutilation. This painting also lacks the pathos of Guignard’s sacred figures. If blood constitutes an edifying example in the Baroque and in its reappropriation by Guignard, one could assert that, for Bellavinha, it is pure vital and living flux. It is an element of physical composition, stripped of emotional charge and symbolic construction. It is therefore pure visual event.
The Baroque imaginary in Bellavinha converges with Clarice Lispector’s reflections on the real and the abstract instance, in the chronicle “An Abstract Door”: “From a certain point of view, I consider making abstract things as the least literary.” “Certain pages, empty of event, give me the sensation of touching the thing itself, and it is the greatest sincerity. It is as if I were sculpting—what is the truest sculpture of a body? The body, the form of the body, the expression of the body’s own form—and not the ‘given’ expression of the body.” For nearly three decades, Adriana Varejão has worked with the traditions of cultural exchange between the West and the East as a foundation of visual culture in Brazil. Varejão weaves images from art history to construct a critical possibility for understanding the politics of the present. Her painting Passage from Macau to Vila Rica constitutes a horizontal narrative, as in calligraphic scrolls and Eastern landscapes; it cites the blue ware of Macau and the Baroque sentiment in the bleeding heart in lacquer. It situates Brazilian churches within the Chinese landscape of the mountains of Minas Gerais converted into cliffs. Guignard, a dreamer of this China, traced a vertical perspective. On the route from Macau to Vila Rica, Varejão indicates the mental itinerary through which one apprehends the world as totality, along the paths of navigators, merchants, and missionaries. Conclusively, it is fitting to consider that Varejão and Bellavinha are authors of singular work, complementary in their extreme difference.
The architectural dimension of the Sabarás, with wide brushstrokes—sometimes thick, always firm, vigorous—is founded on the strength of verticals. The body formulates the painting not through the brush and wrist, but through the painter’s muscular tonus. The bodily determination in the direction and dimension of these strokes erects the architecture. These are decisions of necessary engineering. Each pictorial act by Bellavinha establishes itself in the field with the firmness of a column supporting the gaze in the construction of the monument. These are the minimal markers of Bellavinha’s “abstract door.” The eye finds passages, openings in the topography of the painting, co-constructed by the density or thinning of matter—breaches through which the gaze penetrates and expands, crossing the colonnade. They are hiatuses in time. Fissures in memory. Her allusions to the Macau Door of the anonymous artisan—and of her childhood.
“My story was to reduce. Not chromatically, but in matter.” The temptation is to say that Bellavinha does not paint red. She does not seem to investigate a color. The universe of the Sabarás would not be a monochrome, because there is not even a reference to a palette from which she would choose or deduce the governing color. The painter does not use white; it appears only as the originating light of the canvas. The saturation of certain pigments under the action of water produces blue veins, like arteries visible beneath skin. Yet the painter reiterates that red “comes from iron,” and that iron, in turn, is part of the composition of blood. What appears incarnate in this studio, therefore, is not red, but iron—the matter of the world more than the color. Thus, the painting aligns itself with the mineral family of Amilcar de Castro’s sculpture. If what circulates there alludes to the red blood cell, its vehicle could then be a form of plasma. This pigmented blood is therefore ore, since the etymology of hematite and hemocytes is linked to iron. In terms of painting as a kind of sanguine action, Bellavinha is more interested in the circulation of blood than in its coagulation. This is also the sense in which history infiltrates her work, as a substance that circulates and “confers” thickness to the present.
In the Sabarás, the pictorial field gains the sense of three-dimensional space through the foliation of the painted plane. The procedure of this painting becomes singular by superimposing two canvases to be worked simultaneously through the same pictorial act. Bellavinha paints directly onto the first, which lets color filter through to the second. The top canvas is thus painted in full view, like alluvial gold. The second canvas is a kind of blind painting, since, lying beneath the first, it gathers the excesses, the unabsorbed, the filtered. If the first canvas is the visible surface, the second would be a geological layer for a stratigraphic gaze. The back canvas is memory—something buried beneath the geological layer of the first canvas, like underground gold. The “behind” paintings—the second canvas—are not ghosts, mirrorings, or reproductions of the first. In some cases, Bellavinha works on the second canvas if the painting seems faint, requires another temperature, or needs the realization of some architectural plane. The back painting gathers the surplus and, with it, seeks to become viable as painting, more than as image. In the first painting, made under view, one perceives methodical guidance. In the back one, chance initially asserts itself through blindness—or pseudo-blindness, since something is known and precedes intention—but one must consider the movement of liquids, their mechanics, their dynamics, and the settling of matter. Something there announces itself as archaeological strata. “I don’t worry about what is behind, on the second canvas. I even forget it. I want the element of surprise. As the mystery takes shape, I feel the moment to stop approaching.” Thus, the Sabarás must be exhibited in pairs: not as diptychs, but side by side, like unfaithful doubles.