The catalogs and books invariably present photos of her in the studio or of the arrangement of artworks there, when it’s not artworks amalgamated to the place. Everything can be different: the artist’s face, the material with which she is working, the formal result – but the place where the artwork is produced doesn’t change. Was this symbiosis with the work space upset by the series of seacoast photographs that widens the outline of this ever changing steep slope (this one wholly produced in the studio)?
Marina Saleme diluted her painting in a sea of doubts. At the same time she definitively placed it at a wailing wall (a wailing for the impossibility of containing). In these two new series of artworks presented at the Paço das Artes, her painting sums up all the hours of dedication and struggle with the medium that this artist has undertaken throughout the more than 10 years of her career. And the result is, once again, beyond painting: the canvas and the brushes, the bidimensionality and the gesture are extinct, what remains is the paint spreading over diverse surfaces, as though freed from the intents of the artist herself.
The infusion of colors into the sea, and their spilling over the walls share a common formal element that links them: the plaster pool holders. It was by way of these that the author achieved for her painting the effect of spilling that she had been seeking ever since artworks such as Covas Rasas [Shallow Graves/Holes, 1999] and Ferida [Wound, 2001]. Operations of cutting out and excavating gave way to the mold when Marina Saleme perceived that the new pools would have to contain rather than represent such containing. “But if I am not a sculptor, neither am I concerned with the questions of sculpture…” – a thought that led to what best defines her work: removing the ground itself.
Once the pool holders were constructed, the artist attached them to the wall and, not satisfied, let them wander through the landscape. What already did not fit in painting took on a formal photographic resolution, which links the two points of the process. It is not pictorial photography or photography extended as painting, but rather pictorial thought fixed by a photographic mechanism. In the 24 diptychs the relations of transparency, rhythm, color or texture, perspective, depth, analogy or antagonism, luminosity or opaqueness, movement, and silence cabalistically evoke all the hours of the day.
It is still possible, as can be seen, to update the problems of painting in the contemporary key. The steep monochromatic monolith punctuated by oily pools proves this thesis by reinventing once again the traditional genre of landscape. To be seen from the front, in profile, from below and from a suspended platform (only the photographic set furnishes some of these points of view to the visitor), this accumulation of mountains or organs (the natural landscape, the cityscape and intestine have already lived together in blended form in the history of the genre for some time) overflows even the already extended borders of Marina Saleme’s work.
Actually, for this artist, the landscape was never landscape, but rather the construction of space, a space where one can exist: a real space, not a representation. The photographic pairs inscribe a real place that is neither the sea nor the space constructed by the painting; it is a link between the two, the change of liquid to solid, of containment to overflowing. For Marina Saleme, the act of bringing together is never a random operation. One field beckons the other, like the patch of sky seen through the clouds, which takes on another meaning when accompanied by the pool holders drifting over calm waters; or like the line formed by the wave, which continues in the intersection between the ground and the wall of the studio, punctuated by a recipient centralized in space.
When I wanted the sky…
Marina Saleme’s painting springs from the richness of quick things. Having lost interest in a drawing that is too beautiful, too perfect, through painting the artist seeks to insert masses and destroy that controlled world. “I have nothing against figuration, I keep remembering these things, when I wanted the sky” – and points to her paintings from the beginning of the 1990s, which began to feature weaving and dripping. “There are always those skies looming heavily at the top. I imagine today’s weave-like patterns extending themselves and something above that would organize them, as though it were something that was pouring out of ourselves, beyond our awareness. For me, the skies have always been more of a ground than the ground itself.”
At the exhibitions in 1995 at the Luisa Strina Gallery, and in 1996 at the Palácio das Artes, the support-beam/oratory began to organize the ground of this painting covered by sky: “This structure signifying the human condition of being surrendered, it was the place of kneeling, it delimited a downfallen position.” She saw that the sky was the inverted limit. Back in 1997, in the paintings representing human figures lying down and buried, the sky fell entirely: “I don’t find anything ethereal about looking up, the sky is always a weight.”
Her Gotas [Drops], shown in 1999 at the Paço das Artes, fall from a heavy sky. The question of dripping becomes clearer here. In 2001, at the MAM Nestlé exhibition, there appeared paintings with weave-like patterns that could be plainly seen. “They had already existed underneath, covered by paint.” In Celeste [Celestial] we see an absent-minded weave-like pattern. In Jogados [Thrown/Played] the pattern of weaving punctuated by drops, indicating its location, are like coordinates of a chessboard inquiring about the place that these puppets (people? pawns?) may occupy in the world.
Why in pairs?
The 24 photographic pairs evince the unfolding of a thought. Already in her first solo show, at the Centro Cultural de São Paulo in 1990, Marina Saleme exhibited diptychs. Why does this structure always come in twos? When she started photographing the walls that were being “destroyed” in her studio (for having received different configurations and colors), “it was as though it made no sense to show them alone. So, I preferred the wall. That’s where I got the idea of linking; in this way it seems that I have something to do, that I have a function. I think that I use the medium’s vertical structure; I like to work in the form of a cross: that is, painting is horizontal and the vertical structure comes to organize it.”
There are many cases of diptychs that are formed without the artist’s intent: in her studio she generally works on more than one canvas at a time, and during this process one requests more space, or is unsatisfied about something, and winds up invading the other one: “When this happens I don’t nullify what existed before, I simply put elements to link the two. This is what gives rise to the scars, the levels that overlay one another: the ‘past’ is there as texture, it is in the light that comes from below, in the composition with the color that was overlaid; it’s like life, in which things settle, but don’t stop existing.”
Always on the edge of the abyss
The genesis of this liquid that Marina Saleme now spills can be found in her paintings from the late 1990s – like A Santa [The Saint], shown in 1997 at the Paço Imperial – in which some knots of paint begin to punctuate the pictorial space. The pools arose from these knots: they have a rhythm to arise and move about the canvas. Then the pools became drops, which became rain, which turned into wounds and scars. In Covas Rasas (1999) – artworks made of newspapers lain one atop the other, painted white and excavated – the form of the recipient is similar to that of the pool holders, which were to arise later.