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​Texts / Vanda Mangia Kablin, 2004

Color as poetics of construction

​​

The first observation of the work Espelho Movvel by Niura Machado Bellavinha, an artist who appears in the aspects of Minas Gerais tradition and whose matrix of artistic work is in Alberto da Veiga Guignard and Amílcar de Castro, is the capture of color in its still liquid state, in the surfaces undulating waters of Pampulha. Her body of work is processed behind a public gaze, registering in the water mirror, as a kind of cataloging the sensorial experience, the visual immersion in color.

The chromatic field is her work arena, claiming the spectator's gaze, who makes a kind of physical immersion in this pictorial accumulation, as a witness and an active part of this geographical capture. In this operational process of capture, color acquires interiority, as if it contained a kind of noise of nature that only gains stability and takes shape when it materializes, in a second stage, in photographic, video and film enlargements. It is as if the liquid form, on the verge of dissolution, thus gained a permanent presence.

In this first stage of the work's orchestration, the reflections and saturated intensities of red appear in almost threshold situations, to the point of falling apart, as the water surface is associated with the idea of ​​an element of dissolution. The structure of the work is processed by the chromatic accumulation in this optical space where the color elements are organized in vertical lines; almost a canvas of a liquid, fluid, moving, alive nature, dramatized by the immanent nature of color impregnation and saturation.

From a focal point in a panoramic view of the Pampulha art museum, in Belo Horizonte, the artist creates and recreates her optical space, paints and sculpts the watery surface in vibration with color saturation – knowing how to unravel, knowing impregnate himself, this is the way in which his artistic work works.

The artist’s work also does not originate from the silent and intimate space of the studio, but it inscribes itself in the world in a public sphere: it claims the physical presence of the spectator, as if this perception were cumulative for the process of spatial and sensorial intervention. . This need to be public – the condition of a work that does not originate within four walls, implies a symbolic exacerbation that manifests and materializes in this delicate and ephemeral character of appearing in the world, as if it represented the constant search for an art that appears and does not appear and which, suddenly, in this game of oppositions, retains a singular form of exteriorization.

The work is always constituted as a “come to be”, touching a form, trying to show itself as an experience, a fluid, mobile, unstable and undefined nature in its shapes and contours. Color works like an exploratory eye, registering the intensity and building up the thickening of matter. In this operational process of chromatic capture, the work acquires interiority, finally encompassing a plastic form of thought, an expanded awareness  of its artistic dimension.

The notion of process is an essential factor for understanding the work. Color happens on this still liquid surface, in a still tenuous way, to later become more forceful and dramatic: in a first instance, it dissolves and thus impregnates the world around it and finally materializes on the surface of the canvas. Matter, in fact, is appeased, while chromaticism presides over the movements of sucking, impregnating and constituting itself in pictorial matter.

Niura Machado Bellavinha's art gains breath through these different moments. The landscape is the first focus of attraction. The work leaves nature – the moving mirror – for a monochromatic immersion and, thanks to the strength of this pictorial accumulation, it is consolidated in different means of expression, with a public resonance, originating independent and rematerialized works in different geographical territories.

 

Vanda Mangia Klabin

curator

August 2004

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