Solo exhibition
Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo, BR, 2016
Galeria Luisa Strina is pleased to present Marina Saleme’s sixth solo exhibition.
Issues that speak of doubt in relation to the figure and its real position in the world, the vulnerability of existence, presence and, primarily, absence of everything before time and space run through Marina Saleme’s oeuvre. Marina graduated in Art from FAAP in 1982 and taught painting and related creative processes for 10 years at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake. The artist has since worked primarily with painting, drawing and photography.
Her work process is a slow and reflexive one: her paintings are layered, just like her drawings and photos, that do not involve immediate processes.
Marina works with creation, with erasure and with rescue – the act of erasing in her work is related to the impermanence of things or even of truths. The artist formally and poetically works questions about the visible and the invisible and alternation between them: the real and the unreal are themes found in her work, as well as the effects of differing points of view of the truth.
In some of her works, people and landscapes loom under a vast sky, which, due to its vastness, infinitude and mystery, subjects us metaphorically to the uncontrollable of the human condition. These are places bursting with elements of grace and misfortune (which in the artist’s work take the form of lines, drops, lesions, arabesques) and to where some address their prayers.
In the series of photos entitled Real, reality is questioned in the form of slight, successively contradicted interventions made to a single image, radically alternating the perspective of how the elements are presented.
Her photos are usually developed in series and the images gradually unfold – adding to or discussing the meaning of the others. The painting retains all the artist’s thoughts within it, where everything is built – even the erased images. In this regard it is worth recalling the words of Francis Alÿs: “Each advance holds the debt to what came before.”
Marina Saleme works her painting as a language (a tool for the construction of places where things might be) or not, in the end.
The title ‘O céu que nos protege’ [The Sky that Protects Us] was borrowed from Bernardo Bertolucci’s homonymous 1990 film.
Among Marina Salerme’s solo and group exhibitions we can highlight those at the following museums and institutions: MAM-RJ (Rio de Janeiro); Paço Imperial (Rio de Janeiro); Paço das Artes (São Paulo); Centro Universitário Maria Antônia (São Paulo)’ MAM-SP (São Paulo); Palácio das Artes (Belo Horizonte); Musée d’art contemporain de Baie-Saint-Paul (Quebec); Brazilian Embassy in France (Paris).
Her works also feature in highly respected private and public collections, such as those at MAM-RJ (Rio de Janeiro); Coleção Instituto Figueiredo Ferraz (Ribeirão Preto); Instituto Cultural Itaú (São Paulo); MAM-SP (São Paulo); Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo; Fundação Padre Anchieta / Metrópolis, São Paulo.