The
Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes’ work is characterized by the Baroque
colorist quality of her canvases. At first sight, they seem to state as
unequivocal their condition as paintings of organic forms: images of abstracted
flowers, branches, leaves, intuited fragments of bodies. But, in every aspect,
these works reexamine and denaturalize both the apparently organic nature of
what they represent and the rules of the medium in which they are created.
What at a
given moment appears to us as an organic form is revealed an instant later as a
geometry, as a combination of perfect circles displaced from nuclei, as
surprisingly straight lines, and, almost at once, as repeated architectural
fringes, decorative lace, the beads of some impossible carnivalesque necklaces,
which barely a second later will again seem like parts of strange plants or
improbable bodies.
Scarcely
have we allowed ourselves to be seduced for an instant by the sensual
ornamental pleasure that flows from the works, when the swaying – between
natural and constructed, naturalist and abstract, order and chaos – that they
embody strikes back to resettle us into a new experience of uncertainty.
The presence
of a feminine quality in Milhazes’s work has often been remarked on. There is
no doubt that the conventions of a feminine representational discourse are
exploited here to build up the system of tensions and oppositions that give
form to the work, as are the tensions between what, in both art and life, is
considered either high or popular.
However,
it is precisely the clash among these diverse discourses -between geometry and
the order of the traditionally conceived as feminine, between the domestic and its
outside, between the body and its adornment, between identity and its
disguises- that fashions the density and complexity of these works.
If the
abundance of signifying layers, of discursive levels, is characteristic of the
forms that appear in these works, its technique literally embodies this trait.
Milhazes rebels against the conventional opacity of the canvas by searching for
and giving form to its profiles and colors on a transparent surface. Paint is
then detached from that surface and transplanted, in an operation at once
surgical and organic, onto the canvas, creating layers, producing a space of
subtle indistinction between the bidimensional and tridimensional on the
picture plane.
The
remaining spaces seem to be resolved in a simpler, more conventional manner.
But those scratches -those traces of past presences that invite us to think
about the age of things, about the passage of time, and that occasionally mark
the otherwise unscathed surfaces of some of Milhazes’s works- do not even allow
us the comfort of settling down on the unproblematic smoothness of the new.
The works
of Beatriz Milhazes locate their meaning at the instant where a still-life
which is not a still life turns on itself to become a living abstraction, an
abstract landscape, the secret portrait of the inside on the outside of a body,
the thin skin that is detached from a body to be set, baroquely, on a canvas. |
