To understand the beginnings of Marina Saleme’s trajectory, a brief overview of Brazilian art in the 1980s is helpful. Having left behind the art movements (concrete art, neo-concrete art, conceptual art, pop art) and laid the foundations of what might already be termed ‘contemporary art’, the art produced in Brazil in that decade was gradually ridding itself of the aesthetic pledges made by history, for history, and advancing through a territory in which individual actions had more weight than collective ones. There were of course exceptions – excellent ones at that – such as Casa 7, 3Nós3, A Moreninha and Visorama, but in general the artists of this generation rejected the system of hierarchies and aesthetic programmes with scepticism and irony, and attempted to deconstruct the idea of progression in art.
The 1980s also saw the end of the boycott of the Bienal de São Paulo, which in 1985 had its 18th edition, curated by Sheila Lerner, with the memorable room ‘A Grande Tela’ (The Big Canvas). The idea of a ‘return’ to painting, which critics made so much of throughout this period, has some truth to it, though some of the points explored are debatable. It is claimed that, after the experiments with technology and inspiration drawn from performance, conceptual and minimalist art, painting had fallen out of favour as a field of production and experimentation in Brazilian art. But what about those artists who had devoted not just the 1970s but their whole lives to painting, like Antonio Dias, Carlos Vergara, Claudio Tozzi, Eduardo Sued, Paulo Roberto Leal, and many others? Painting has always been a widely explored medium in Brazil, and a test bed for experimentation and research by artists. My theory is that, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, many art schools were set up in Brazil, in the academic sphere as well as independent ones with less orthodox curricula, and painting, sculpture and drawing continued to be widely taught at these institutions. There were few opportunities for art students or artists starting out to study video or performance art in Brazil at that time.
Meanwhile, Brazilian painters began to take inspiration from German neo-expressionism, very much in vogue in the mid-1980s. Painters like Baselitz, Lüpertz, Polke, Richter, Kiefer and A.R. Penck soon became references for the Brazilians, partly because they also began to be seen at the Bienal. This recovery of a personal strand and romantic source was apparent not only in the themes of the paintings, but also in the choice of mediums, with a return to handcrafting and the use of unusual materials added to the surface of the canvas. Renewed importance was given to subjectivity, gesture and intuition, while at the same time a darker, heavier, gloomier mood permeated the paintings.
Politically, this was also an important moment for Brazil, with the redemocratisation process. The Diretas Já movement calling for direct presidential elections, the popular clamour for an end to the dictatorship, and street protests demanding free elections and the establishment of a republican regime – even if no one had any idea what that new regime would be like, hence a widespread feeling of uncertainty – spilled over conceptually into art production in Brazil at the time, and painting became a kind of barometer of that tension.
Saleme’s professional career began in 1985, when she participated in her first exhibitions. Then, in 1989, she took part in a major exhibition entitled Pinturas e Esculturas (Paintings and Sculptures), at the Paço das Artes, in São Paulo. That year, she painted Sem título (Untitled), a diptych measuring 200 cm by 300 cm, which encapsulates the zeitgeist I have just described. We see a cross, partly concealed by a veil, both heavy and soft, which makes it levitate. The whitish tone of the oil creates a sublime mood, without allowing us to forget that there is something terrible in that scene. There is violence and passion here, processed and translated onto the surface of the canvas. The same year saw another diptych: a landscape outlined in dark shades against a yellow background. It is hard to tell exactly what it is. A suspended object resting on two poles? A weight? A bridge? The image is irregular. Rather than revealing, it seeks to hide its own appearance or existence. The artist is interested in making things dissolve in the world. Her choice of large-format canvases intensifies this mysterious, phantasmagorical mood. Successive layers of paint make the figures she explores gain materiality, accentuating their desire for space.
It is impressive to note in these early years the maturity of Saleme’s painting and the consistency of her research. Fast-forwarding to her later career may help shed some light on the relevance and coherence of these early works. It should be pointed out first, however, that Saleme works intuitively and in no way was her path of development planned. Her work follows a unique process, revealing forms by concealing them. In other words, the successive layers create a depth of volume that supposedly distances us from the first layer, yet the artist devises a system that prevents us from forgetting the initial image and takes us to a territory of new discoveries and premises about that image, which develop its pictorial potential.
O céu que nos protege (The sheltering sky, 2015), a series of five photographs taken by the artist in Regent’s Park, London, is an example of this paradoxical exploration of appearance and absence. The photos were printed with reticulation, which means that, depending on the position of the viewer, they reveal, almost simultaneously, a bucolic landscape, with a denser, more muted atmosphere, and the emergence of a pictorial mass that imposes itself as a character rather than an illustration of the scene. As viewers, we feel disorientated, as a whirlwind of colours and shapes creates another level of comprehension of the reality around us. Depending on where we stand in relation to the picture, we erase or reveal people, trees, flowers, ground or clouds. In a sense, the viewer becomes the protagonist and author of a narrative. Photography and painting merge to create situations that subvert the order of things and the actual existence of what is before us, casting doubt over what we have always accepted as being true.
This strategy of revealing by concealing can also be seen in O passeio (The outing, 2013), in which the artist chances upon a series of trees that have been covered with coffee sacks to protect them against the cold. The way this has been done lends the trees anthropomorphic qualities. They resemble an army, marching nowhere. In the light of the migrant crisis, it is hard not to think of the great mass of human beings who risk their lives crossing the seas in the hope of a better life, fleeing civil war, hunger and all kinds of devastation. Saleme’s fleshless bodies are like a muffled cry from the heart against the hypocrisy of the world.
In Sábado (Saturday, 2015), photography and painting fuse to the point where we are unable to identify exactly where one ends and the other begins; their boundaries have become blurred. The photographic prints on canvas have their own autonomy and, as with Saleme’s work in general, the artist stresses the ambiguity and uncertainty of the images before us. The photo is not revealed in its entirety – or perhaps imprecision is in its very nature. The dramatic quality is maintained in this series, the paint appearing to engulf the people. Nature is supplanted by paint, which shelters or looms over the people in their ‘island’.
In both cases, the combination of photography and painting introduces a concept of montage: the image of a family at the park takes on an entirely different mood, so that we are torn between the captivating beauty of the forms created by the artist and the menacing aspect of a pictorial ‘stain’ that appears both to pour out and swallow up everything and everyone. But unlike in O céu que nos protege, in Sábado the pictorial layer applied over the photo conveys a sense of comfort. The ambiguity is perhaps less powerful here, but that in no way detracts from the quality of the work; on the contrary, it presents a characteristic which is apparent throughout Saleme’s production: a sensibility for the tragic and for the precariousness of existence.
Returning to the late 80s and early 90s, let us look in more depth at a point touched upon earlier. The climate of unease, uncertainty and political and economic instability under the Collor government filtered through society, and art which sought to address more directly what was going on in the world did not shy away from this moment. Internationally, the mood of happiness after the fall of the Berlin Wall was tempered by hesitation. No one knew for certain what it would be like to live in a post-Cold War world. There was a sense of reconstruction enveloped in a mood of doubt and resignation.
I am not saying Saleme’s work is politically motivated or associated with a particular ideology, but it does reflect the time in which it was made. It is a product of the artist’s perception of the world. That said, it is absorbing for reasons that go beyond any historical references. It succeeds in condensing individual feelings without referring to specific political or social events, yet at the same time without allowing us to forget the time in which we live. As such, it is quintessentially timeless and transnational. It is informed by the concept of individuation and the formation of the viewer’s perspective. It is a work that is bound up with the fears, desires, joys, despair and utopias that govern our lives. In Paisagem com casa (Landscape with house, 1992), it is as if the house is being swallowed up by the vast red landscape surrounding it. We feel a growing sense of solitude as we gaze upon its tiny, defenceless structure. The house’s diminutive size is further accentuated by the choice of large format.
Saleme’s creative process is quite unique. I see little similarity between her and the artists who participated in Como vai você, geração 80? (How are you, generation 1980?), the iconic 1984 exhibition at the School of Visual Arts in Parque Lage, Rio de Janeiro, which brought together artists, and in particular painters, mostly from Rio but also from São Paulo. She has nothing of the punk rock attitude, the scorn and the irreverence, of some of her contemporaries. Her experiments with neo-expressionism, for instance, are vastly different from those of Cristina Canale. Her experimentation is distinct from that of Leda Catunda, who stresses the materiality of her medium. She has nothing of the irreverence or pop-art language used by Leonilson and Zerbini. She does not share the abstract-expressionist festiveness of Jorge Guinle Filho, or the satire or grotesque motifs found in certain paintings by members of Casa 7. In her own words, the artist defines the place of her painting as follows:
“I work with the idea of the physical and emotional instability, fragility and impermanence of all things. I have always found it disturbing how precarious a thread separates us from non-existence, from the great void; how we are on the edge of the abyss. Painting interests me because of the slightly visceral fluidity of the material, and the way it captures time, in layers (like days, weeks, or life). Just like in our own emotional development, all interventions leave visible and invisible marks. Even strokes which are ultimately obliterated form a constituent part of the painting.”
For me, that viscerality is found in the running paint, blurred shapes, puddles and meshes that unfold as Saleme paints. They are forces which, in the act of painting itself or in how they appear to the world, evolve, question and cast doubt over our convictions about our surroundings. In one picture from 1995, overlapping shades of red lend a kind of haze to its surface. The landscape dissolves, for we are unable to see it clearly. And that, I suspect, is the enigma which interests her. A revelation that occurs gradually, in the slow, continuous encounter between work and viewer.
In Sem título (1993), the density of oil applied to the canvas creates the illusion of figure and background alternating their positions. The landscape appears to swallow up the observer. This unique world of Saleme’s, at least in the first ten years of her production, is created by means of a tragic landscape consumed by the rhythmic construction of an atmosphere steeped in neo-expressionist tendencies. What comes across in these paintings is the idea of an individual plunged in uncertainty; someone who does not make plans for the future because the unpredictability of the present does not allow them to dream of a world any less tragic.
Meanwhile, in O trançador (The weaver, 1995), it is impressive how a monochrome can reveal successive stories and nuances. From the action of the brush strokes, which put up doors, divisions, structures, modules, separations – a mesh which compartmentalises the space – it is clear that, when Saleme opts for this economy, the result is by no means a simple, flat structure. This space made of colour-light and time needs to be continually revealed. The colour vibrates, seeking to penetrate and be a part of the enigmatic space, and demands that we give our full attention to every detail of that space. The red here is not passion or violence, but mystery, a space of unceasing discovery that is offered to the viewer. In Céu de almas (Sky of souls), from the same year, the condensed brush strokes conjure up a quite different atmosphere. The sky – redemption – guards over a tragic and uncomfortable scene. The use of various shades of blue, as well as red, conveys a sinister, inhospitable mood. It is examples like these which make Saleme’s work hard to classify. It cannot be pigeonholed with any conviction as belonging to a particular school. Her work is committed to the ways in which we see, understand and relate to the world.
In Três pessoas (Three people) and Duas pessoas (Two people), both from 1999, the bodies of the figures appear to be falling apart. They are devoid of carnality. There is disenchantment, neglect, silence, solitude and despair. The tragedy is in the very passing of life. There seems to be nothing left in the world but the awareness of our own existential density. A parallel can be drawn between these works and the series Tudo te é falso e inútil (All is false and useless to you, c. 1992), by Iberê Camargo, in which the figures explored by the artist have a lost look in their eye; they are unable to look directly at the world, and therefore at the viewer. Like in the plays of Beckett, time does not run out, and it is as if these figures are conditioned to the uncertainty of waiting. Enveloped in a harrowing atmosphere, they simply stand there expectantly, oblivious to the signs that something new is happening. Returning to Saleme’s two pictures, notice how all the figures are faceless, concealed by the shadows produced by the density and volume of the oil. It is also interesting to note, at this point in time, the growing presence of the human figure, or allusions to it, in the artist’s paintings. The landscape begins to be invaded by these characters. And the parallel with Camargo can be extended to include the presence of these dark, solitary, deformed figures.
This exploration of the density of matter reaches a degree of maturity in the series Covas rasas (Shallow graves, 1999). Layers of newspaper create a kind of surface or canvas upon which linseed oil, acrylic and pigments act in combination, with a two-fold effect: as well as the emergence of volume, which makes the material thick and skin-like, so that we can see the grooves and marks in it, there is also a powerful illusion of depth, as if this viscous stain were corroding the layers of paper. It is interesting to note the influence which, for a short time, Camargo – and perhaps also Tàpies and the informal school – had on Saleme’s work. Paint is not only colour but matter itself – tragically, beguilingly, frighteningly real. This investigation began two years earlier with the series of 24 pictures entitled Poças (Puddles). In it, albeit on canvas, the artist looks at the relationships she will explore in greater depth in Covas: through the accumulation of oil and its own materiality, she studies the relationship between figure and background, depth and volume, to imbue the paintings with an illusionistic nature, to the point where they almost become objects in Covas rasas. Notice also, in Poças, the scores or streaks scratched into the surface and the anticipation of what I referred to as ‘skin’ in Covas.
But the second half of the 1990s also represents a variation in Saleme’s palette. In Dois lagos (Two lakes, 1995), matter becomes more vibrant and less dramatic. Colour delimits the lakes, giving a lightness to the experience of viewing them. The heavy, gloomy aspect is put to one side, and the colour gives an ethereal spatiality to the lakes, which appear to float above the plane, while at the same time being detached from the surface and heading towards space. In Gotas (Drops) and Chuva (Rain), both from 1999, the ethereal aspect remains. Falling droplets spark our imaginations with the suggestion that they are weightless, and this image helps us reflect on the fact that Saleme’s work is beginning to take on a softness and delicacy. A simple, silent colour – at times associated with joy, at others with tragedy, but which certainly does not need to make much noise to make its presence felt. These are translucent paintings, for this liquid construction means that the pictorial planes cross over one another. They are weightless forms, which appear to have nothing supporting them as they float aimlessly across the plane, giving an alternative meaning to gravity.
Two years earlier, the artist had produced O passeio, which combines a number of concepts explored by the artist in her first ten years of production – in particular, solitude, deformity and a certain tragic quality – but also attributes with which she was experimenting towards the end of that decade, like the broadening of her palette to include softer shades and the use of smaller canvases. This more intimate tone in her painting is clearly visible in Garrafas (Bottles, 2001). We are still in the presence of shadowy shapes (the bottles). An outline demarcates the area of the objects, which are translucent. The viewer’s gaze can pass right through them. We continue to dissect objects, landscapes and figures, which the artist sets before our eyes. There is also a desire to question ordinary life, for objects to be perceived as active, living things, as figures on the stage that is the canvas.
The tragic tone persists in Assento/abismo (Seat/abyss, 2003). In the foreground, we see what the artist herself describes as “a structure supported by columns, as if it were a barrier or fence onto that abyss”, and through the gaps in it we glimpse a mountain and the abyss itself. In shades of green, the painting still pursues that sense of a state of alert, appearing to indicate that some fatal, catastrophic event is about to occur. There is a feeling of suspense, yet the work can equally well be appreciated as a landscape painting, seen from a slightly unusual perspective, offering an oblique, partial view of nature. In my opinion, by giving this almost theatrical quality to pictorial space, in at least some of her works, Saleme not only expresses a new approach to perspective in painting, but also shows the influence of other artistic languages on her work, making it vivid and current.
Between 2004 and 2005, Saleme made four pictures that lay claim to a certain airy quality in her production. Teto (Roof) and Sem chão (Groundless), both from 2004, and Almas voadoras (Flying souls) and Céu rosa com nuvens muito pesadas (Pink sky with very heavy clouds), both from 2005, are weightless. The titles of these works and their direct dialogue with nature produce a nominal and phenomenological association between lightness and disappearance into space. As they shift between retaining and containing everything, these paintings ask us to think about their appearance at the same time as they create a space without gravity. The images contained in these works are held in an orbit that suggests a suspension of time. These are situations that lie at the frontier between the reality of an objective world and a utopic daydream in which the order of things obeys a new law.
Céu inverso (Inverse sky, 2001) is a work which anticipated these themes and already signalled the artist’s desire to reappraise the qualities, convictions and timescales of the world. The sky is the ground, and vice versa; certainties are thrown into question. And can there be a more noble ‘function’ for art than that: to reappraise the world around us? These are definitely paintings that evoke a continual transition, like nature itself. This series of pictures clearly sets store by silence and contemplation, rather than evoking a world of excess in which the virtues of noise seem to be extolled at every turn. In these times of information overload, Saleme slows time down by means of subtle economy and intimate scale. In an uncontrived way, we are asked to question our own perceptions and lend our own bodies to the world.
In 2006, the artist began the series Liquid Paper, an allusion to the correction fluid. Both in the picture that takes its title from the series, and in Atados (Tied, 2008) and Praça (Town square, 2008), the artist uses successive layers of paint to correct, modify, move things around and erase people and landscapes. Here, the act of erasing is not final, but implies a renewed existence. The figures are transformed into shadows, shapes, phantoms. All are concealed and do not wish to be identified or recognised. They drift anonymously through the landscape. They have no body, only flesh. In Atados, the couple are joined by a string of arabesques, before a landscape that mingles with their own silhouettes.
There is no hope or prospect of escape in these three paintings. Yet, in Atados as in Praça, the choice of palette, and thus the way the landscape and space are constructed, recalls a gentle imaginary world – particularly in Atados, due to the mild, angelical universe alluded to by the colour pink, in counterpoint to the fact that the two figures are bound. In Praça, the figure on the far left is barely more than an outline: its “body” is translucent, “questioning the materiality of our existence”, the landscape passing through it. Body and world fuse into a single entity. All these figures appear to await their inevitable end. They are bidding farewell to the world or drifting through it as if their commitment to this cause were ruled by eternity itself.
Por trás disso tudo (Behind it all, 2009) resumes this thread. A state of liquefaction is in evidence. Faces are shrouded in shadow. From this arid, empty, sterile setting, nothing can be added or removed: its spatiality is absolutely mute. Everything occurs in a movement as near to immobility as possible. This atmosphere leads us to ask the question: what is happening, if nothing is happening? In this painting, all the dramatic action takes place at a languid, unhurried pace, the figures, almost imperceptibly, fading – or melting? – away. The structure supporting the doors which the figures come through appears to be crumbling, rusting away. Everything appears to be dissolving, vanishing. It is the eternal return of an end… or a beginning.
Specificities aside, this image of dissolution or dissipation creates a connection with two pictures: Fortuna (Fortune, 2009) and Pendente (Pendant, 2010). In the former, clouds – a recurring image in Saleme’s work – pour out golden sparks that displace the ground, which is made of and delimited by a similar shade. It is an image of displacement, of a fluid territory being slowly but continually filled in, to form a space that we symbolically feel and find our way around. Meanwhile, the dizzying brush strokes in Pendente convey a sense that the mesh-like and fabric-like forms are being fashioned before our very eyes. This overlapping of tactile sensations gives the surface an organic quality. Perceiving the differences and the feeling of strangeness inspired by these paintings enables us to deal with certain impositions in our daily lives. Recognising that the world is governed by difference, and living integrated lives accordingly, can be the most constructive course to take. And art certainly contributes to that process.
A similar process to that found in Liquid Paper would come some ten years later in the photographic series Real (Real, 2015). In it, the addition of certain structures, which have the effect of creating spaces and raising questions about reality, builds a flexible narrative, open to the viewer. The initial image of two sets of makeshift goal posts made of wooden stakes, of the sort commonly seen on the beaches of Brazil, is gradually transformed into a kind of house, by means a pictorial construction. Throughout the photographic sequence, what was a commonplace scene captured entirely by chance by the artist, metamorphoses into an archetypal shelter or dwelling. As in a film, play, book or other narrative medium, we are led to project an engaging, seamless story onto the images.
This is also the case of Garranchos (Branches, 2015), a polyptych in which the cut-out images of branches of trees found in the same street compose a symbolic dance. The way the images are laid out – never following a pattern, so that the polyptych can be assembled in a variety of ways – and the intimate, poetic way the branches have been documented, produces a circular movement reminiscent of a dance. The silhouettes of the branches against the city lights reinforce the celebratory tone of a body in motion. Once again, elements of nature are fused with human aspects in the artist’s work.
I like to think of Saleme’s work as being made up of mists, veils or layers. Like layers of skin, her brush strokes gradually compose a body. We perceive the subtleties and texture of a surface as, little by little, it is made flesh. In Estrelada (Starry) and Confete (Confetti), both from 2008, successive layers of oil act as transparencies, interspersing and displacing one another, at times suffusing the paintings with a velvety appearance, at others with a roughness or a tactile sensation that is more fluid and ethereal. Once again, the archetype of the air is in evidence. Forms become weightless, drifting and floating through the air as if constituting a parallel reality to the gravity to which we are accustomed. Skin-like, they are committed to lightness and, like the translucent objects that they are, they force us to look through things. By enabling us to see textures, sensations, bodies and skins in painting, the artist makes our eyes more sensitive to the world, softening the harshness and incomprehension around us which make us blind, however involuntarily, to the atrocities of everyday life.
Saleme’s paintings are structured around cut-outs, landscapes or disparate forms, which create a narrative when they come into contact with one another. In Céu rosa despencando sobre paisagem (Pink sky falling towards landscape, 2008) and Céu despencando (Falling sky, 2009), the image of the sky itself losing its stability and going into free fall presents us with a situation of impossibility, ruin and apocalypse. The natural order of things is broken. Yet there is also something gentle and smooth in the way the artist handles her brush and how she composes the ‘scenes’ of her paintings. It is as if two opposing forces were interacting in the same space. And that is precisely my point: her painting is like an encounter between islands which, having established their proximity, build elective affinities. Figure and background and light and shade are constantly negotiating their own space, creating their own rhythms and (dis)appearances.
Throughout her career, there is a palpable sense that Saleme’s paintings are not ‘ready’. As she herself puts it, “nothing is final, but there is a moment when the painting is ready, or at least stops troubling me”. That is the nature and the main quality of her work: the eternal challenge of remaking herself at every turn, of presenting her own nonconformity and commitment to mutability. What stands out both in her paintings and her photographs is the mood of silence and melancholy. And it is through the introduction of small touches – the harmony between photograph and painting building a coherent, poetic narrative and intersecting dialogue, and a structure apparently in flux – that the artist achieves a repertoire of subtle, intense compositions which make her work quite unique.
In the series Únicas (Unique, 2010), Saleme continues her exploration of the slow but continual process of revealing these different layers which form what might be described as an epidermis. By exploring the translucent texture of the layers, she allows us to see through them to the interior of this ‘body’ transmuted into painting. Notice that there are holes, voids, islands, dislocations, open veins so that these paintings can trigger a whole field of interpretative possibilities, enabling the viewer to adopt their own standpoint and create their own narratives. The tension between figure and background leads the viewer’s gaze to examine each image in turn, following the graphic and chromatic exuberance of the works.
I would venture to say that Saleme shows an interest in the ornamental motifs of fellow Brazilian Alberto da Veiga Guignard, yet this in no way makes her work ‘decorative’ in the pejorative sense. The strongest influence is found in Guignard’s paisagens imaginantes (imaginatory landscapes). Beyond suspending towns, topography and objects so that they float weightlessly in an invented landscaped, Guignard creates a bleak, gloomy world. And it is this melancholy atmosphere, interwoven with a decorative, fantastical quality, which establishes a valid, fluid point of intersection with Saleme’s paintings. One important difference to note, particularly with regard to this series by Saleme and the dialogue with Guignard, is that the palette and perspective she adopts draw the viewer’s gaze so close in to the work that we come into real and immediate contact with the very ‘viscera’ of the painting. These are not landscapes to be admired for their splendour, but paintings waiting to reveal their most intimate details. Hence the image of an unfinished structure.
It seems to me that Brazil has been systematically depicted overseas as a monolithic landscape of wild, dazzling nature adorned with sensual curves – in every sense – and inhabited by a joyous, uninhibited people. To what extent is this myth or reality? Can we be certain about the identity of a people to the point of constructing its personality? I like to think that the art produced in Brazil breaks with the stereotypes and displays other references about the landscape and the people who inhabit it: there is a dense, noisy, unfinished, pessimistic atmosphere, which sits alongside all the (supposed) optimism inherent to the ‘triad’ that in many ways laid the foundations of Brazilian culture in the post-war era. And here is where Saleme’s work dialogues with that less sunny landscape, enabling us to see the world in all its diversity.
In Sem título (Untitled, 2013), a dark, faceless, apparently female figure is dispersed in a phantasmagorical atmosphere and appears to merge into an arid, chaotic landscape. The red of the structure on which the figure leans serves to heighten the tone of suffering. There appears to be no way out, as the figure announces its own tragedy. The scene is frozen in time. There is hope in the future, at the same time as both figure and scene appear resigned to their states of apprehension and dread. Returning to the question of identity, Saleme’s work is not about Brazil. As an artist born in this country, she obviously absorbs technical, social and political themes developed here, but the landscape presented in her works is indeterminate in time and place, and encourages us to reflect on questions essential to our cultural development, making us more sensitive to what goes on around us.
There is a vulnerability in many of the figures Saleme depicts. In Garotas (Girls, 2013), for instance, we see the backs of three bodies (we deduce from the title that they are girls) wrapped up in robes, looking at the landscape around them. The painting has a melancholy mood; more than that: all is vulnerable. The girls seem to be protecting themselves against their own fragile state. Notice the wooden structure on the ground, like a guardrail separating them from the abyss. Their backs to the viewer, they do not want to face the world, instead covering themselves and hiding their faces.
The landscape is distant, as if all the time and effort put in were not enough to take them to their goal – which I suspect to be that very landscape. The choice of sombre tones and cold colours, together with the scale of the painting (200 cm x 160 cm), makes our perception shift between the sublime – with emphasis on the tragic – and the figures’ icy appearance. There is something uneasy about this apparent simplicity. Incredibly, the aura of loss which pervades the painting creates a relationship of empathy with the viewer. We feel a sense of solidarity with the girls. We share the same pain, anguish and hope.
In 2012, Saleme made As descabeladas (Unkempt). In this series of some 200 pictures, each measuring 40 cm x 30 cm, the artist constructs an ingenious dialogue between painting and drawing. The scale of the pictures means there is a subtle, intimate relationship with the image, and more specifically with the feminine world. The series is a kind of synthesis of her work. Recurring themes that are vital to our understanding of her work as a coherent whole are there: death, the end, renewal, neglect, solitude, vulnerability, dread, passion and dizziness. In sombre tones, what predominates in this powerful series is a subtlety in the brush strokes and in the appearance of forms, hence the reference to drawing.
When placed side by side, like a large panel, As descabeladas acts like a painting of single photographic frames. Their scale and dynamic form a connection with film, both in terms of the hypnotic power of the images and the way in which they structured, with sequences produced using montage, sweeping dolly shots and cuts. A succession of windows condenses the limits of the image, giving a feeling of discomfort at the space delimited by the plane. Moreover, these are paintings of universal memory, in which meaning runs over from one to the next. The viewer feels a sense of compassion at the scenes revealed by the artist. As we cast our eyes over the wall, the series takes us from one sequence of pictures to the next, as if from one reminiscence to another.
The artist’s most recent paintings take transparency and images of a world comprised of sky and clouds as their main themes. Purple clouds (2015) is made up of a number of interspersed layers. As well as the image of the purple cloud in the foreground – which is falling both literally and figuratively, the paint’s own mass causing it to run – in the background, on the left-hand side of the canvas, are vertical arabesques that merge with the trickling cloud. On the right-hand side is a mass of paint in a darker shade than the arabesques, which could be described as a series of stains. The painting carries on with the themes of appearance, camouflage, emergence and erasure found throughout Saleme’s career. I like to think once again of a friendly relationship between apparently dissonant colours; in this case, gold and purple. Side by side, they create a tragic, symbolic and at the same time humane atmosphere.
In Céu com ganchos (Sky with hooks), from the same year, and Céu (Sky, 2015-16), it is interesting to note the way in which the cloud is transformed into thick, dense matter. It is the ‘heart’ of the two paintings, for it concentrates the energy which it expends slowly, in the form of paint running in small trickles down the canvas. The cloud is a body, and that is the metaphor I use to interpret this group of paintings. The ‘body’ slowly disintegrates as it loses matter. Hence the artist is seeing, describing, building and experimenting with time; not everyday, mechanical time – which turns us into machines or prisoners of our own routines – but ‘duration-time’. This expression was coined by Merleau-Ponty in the essay ‘L’oeil et l’esprit’ (‘Eye and Mind’): “To think is (…) to test out, to operate, to transform – on the condition that this activity is regulated by an experimental control that admits only the most ‘worked-out’ phenomena, more likely produced by the apparatus than recorded by it.” A time that is engendered by our own will, fashioned by subtleties and differences of scale and importance in relation to what is considered natural. It is the possibility of expanding, freezing or shrinking time through the experience that we have with the Other. The way in which time behaves in Saleme’s paintings is unashamedly slow, tragic and heavy; and that is the essential experience of her work: the concept of duration which she constructs in conjunction with her project for the individuation of experience. It is what we might call ‘living for the moment’.