It has been raining in São Paulo nonstop for three days, and, even so, it seems like it gets hotter toward the end of the afternoon. In Pinheiros District, inside Marina Saleme’s studio, the temperature remains hot, but unsteady: seven recently finished large-scale paintings – about 2.20 x 2 meters each – dominate the setting, resting on empty paint cans. The place is small for canvases of this size, it’s a bit stifling, and the smell of oil is inebriating for anyone who just came in. One gets the urge to tilt one’s head back and spin around, like a child. The paint is spread over the floor like a sticky, living organism, crawling over the walls, columns, stairs and objects, the artist’s clothes and body. The dizzying experience of being there recalls the impact of walking for the first time into the famous circular “installation” of water lilies created by Monet at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris.
Upon arrival back from this delirium, the visitor finds himself before the series Sem-Chão [Unstable Ground], the most recent gathering of Marina Saleme’s production for her solo show at Luisa Strina Gallery (unfortunately, the “white cube” does not furnish an epiphany similar to that of the studio). The questions she dealt with in her earlier solo show, Continentes [Continents/Containers], in September of last year at the Paço das Artes, have returned transfigured. Throughout a long process she worked with the notions of contain/be contained, invade a place and overflow; ideas which now, in a different form, are present in these paintings, marked by a new, open and ethereal space, as if made of pure air. The upper part of the paintings feature forms similar to clouds, heavy and dense lead-colored skies, ready to let loose over our heads. In the rest of the plane one can make out various weave-like patterns of a precarious geometricism, fragile structures that attempt to lend support to the skies. In the most interesting canvas of the series – Assento/Abismo [Seat/Abyss], wherein green predominates – a tangle of rhombuses extends through the canvas horizontally, in a diffuse perspective that definitively imprisons the plane’s formal elements, plus paint and air, in an indissoluble amalgam.
Throughout her career, Marina Saleme (born São Paulo, 1958) has always chosen the most difficult path, based on painting’s impossibilities. Her oeuvre reveals painting’s capacity to position itself in the world as a contemporary work while also remaining linked to the tradition of Brazilian art, without, however, relying on concessions or citations. We may establish, for example, a rich dialogue with the landscapes by Alberto da Veiga Guignard (1896–1962), his metaphysical abysses, his porous space, his multiple perspective that sets up planes which do not allow the gaze to rest anywhere, wandering from one point to another, looking for a place to rest. But Saleme’s lyricism is not rarefied like Guignard’s; it is instead precise like that of Alfredo Volpi’s (1896–1988). This same Assento/Abismo can be related to the Italian-Brazilian painter’s Elementos de Fachada [Facade Elements], with its vertical forms pointing skyward, narrow wooden boards that rise up decidedly, at the next moment revealing their weaknesses. They thus enter into a pact with the other elements of the painting, in which these forms sustain and are sustained, support and ask for support. An ambiguous and interdependent negotiation.
In Marina Saleme’s studio, near the end of our interview, a cockroach appeared from behind a painting, scurried across our feet and hid under a pile of papers. The artist began to scream, going into a panic. She had already commented on her cockroach phobia. I went to look for it, but I didn’t find any insect – just a copper coin, which might have rolled across the floor. Strange… since I thought that I had also clearly seen a cockroach, covered with the same golden color as that of the painting that Marina had chosen to show me. As she couldn’t be sure, she preferred to end the interview and leave. One more test for the brain/eye relationship. Do we see what exists, what we think we are seeing, or are we always midway between the real and our visual subjectivity loaded with memory, culture and, sometimes, fear? I leave the studio and find myself once again within the disordered and inhospitable world of the metropolis, with the certainty that those questions apply as much to painting as life. Night fell, and it is still raining in São Paulo.
Fernando Oliva is a journalist and art critic, a correspondent covering São Paulo for the international art magazine Lápiz