“We are the time./We are the famous/metaphor from Heraclitus, the Obscure. /We are the water, not the hard diamond,/the one that is lost, not the one that stands still./We are the river and we are that Greek/that looks himself into the river./His reflection/changes into the waters of the changing mirror,/into the crystal that changes like the fire./We are the vain predetermined river,/in his travel to his sea./The shadows have surrounded him./Everything said goodbye to us, everything goes away./Memory does not stamp his own coin./However, there is something that stays/however, there is something that bemoans.” (1)
Waters, oceans, organically drawn pools built with care. Woodlands, fields and ordered, landscaped gardens. Blue and green. Alessandra Duarte’s works, striking and alluring, wanders through this chromatic pair and through elements that bring to mind aquatic fluidity and the most basic telluric elements, which are strongly linked to the soil from where the green comes from. In the poem, We are the time. We are the Famous (1985), Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) already signaled the image as being something adrift, dissolved in reflections or running towards the ocean’s horizontality, which says much about the human condition.
In paintings and drawings, Duarte sometimes merges the green and the blue, resulting in color operations that become the main attraction in works like, 24 de Junho and Já Vou, the later gives title to the São Paulo artist’s solo debut in her hometown. In the first work, Duarte gives red the status of a base color while using it to illuminate, in the upper and central part of the painting, a composition full of horizontal strips. In Já Vou, the green and the light blue are predominant, but the brown from the central figure’s diving goggles creates an interesting focus of attention.
Yes, the human form is very important within the landscapes created by the artist. In both these works, of a generous size – 24 de Junho measures 2m x 1.30m – the ocean’s own nature as a harmonic environment that may at any moment be transformed into something unstable is even further altered by the human presence that seems to want to dominate the situation (and, however, such command seems to have fled).
The constructed landscapes gain another reading level in paintings like, Caminhos and All That Baggage... In the first work, the person’s minimal presence succumbs to what has been constructed, like a witness to human ingenuity, while in the second work, it seems intimidated before nature’s advances. “A person born in a seaport has a peculiar education. There is a view of nature’s virtues, of its phenomena, but also of human ingenuity [...] One becomes accustomed to seeing nature not only as a simple landscape, but rather as an ensemble of phenomena,” highlights the architect, Paulo Mendes da Rocha.
Duarte did not live in a port city, but her undergraduate studies at Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY) in a mostly typical American campus in its implementation with constructions scattered through vast green spaces and away from New York’s liveliness, made the return to a dry and noisy São Paulo not so routine. “My college was far away from the city, practically in the middle of nowhere. With this, I basically spent four years living within an inhabited forest. Coming back to São Paulo was a great shock, a live through experience in concrete. This difference of environments and the unison of both stayed in my mind,” she says.
This dual dealing between nature and artifice is also greatly perceived in the artist’s new series of paintings and drawings. The buildings seem to gain greater force and the lines, projections and architectural plans, mingle with greater complexity and pulsate with a clear importance in her compositions. Something that comes close to themes from the German artist, David Schnell – seen in SP in the unjust exhibition Se Não Neste Tempo, at Masp, which ended last January and that also brought the great artists, Tim Eitel and Eberhard Havekost, without mentioning Gerhard, and Daniel Richter, among others. The Scottish artist, Peter Doig, the North American, Amy Sillman and the Swedish, Sigrid Sandström also have a strong echo in the young artist’s production.
Manifesting her contemporary pictorial practice with strength, with such work, Duarte renews postulates that great artists like Josef Albers (1888-1976) – master at Black Mountain College, where names like Eva Hesse (1936-1970) and Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) – developed some time ago. “We should apply his understating of color to our understanding of him; words, and the attempt to pinpoint diversity, fall short. All that is certain is variability. Albers used to say that no two people pictured the same thing upon hearing the word ‘red.’ Like the controls of language, all of Alber’s precision and system were only a guide to, and a celebration of, mystery. To accept, and revel in, ambiguity, seems the great message of this poetry of the laboratory,” writes Nicholas Fox Weber. Restlessness, mystery and poetry, elements that Alessandra Duarte can handle well.
Mario Gioia
(1) BORGES, Jorge Luis. Poesia. Companhia das Letras, São Paulo, 2009, p.378
(2) GIOIA, Mario. Cidades Velhas. Folha de S.Paulo, caderno Mais, 19.abr.2009, p.4
(3) DANILOWITZ, Brenda (org.). Josef Albers – Cor e Luz, Homenagem ao Quadrado. Instituto Tomie Ohtake/The Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, São Paulo, 2009