Women and Painting
I paint because I am a woman
(It´s a logical necessity.)
If painting is female and insanity is a female malady,
then all women painters are mad and all male painters are women. (…)
I paint because I am a religious woman
(I believe in eternity.)
Painting doesn’t freeze time. It circulates and recycles time like a wheel that turns.
Those who were first might well be last. Painting is a very slow art. It doesn’t travel with the speed of light. That’s
why dead painters shine so bright. (…)
I paint because I am a dirty woman
(Painting is a messy business.)
It cannot ever be a pure conceptual medium. The more “conceptual” or cleaner the art, the more the head can be
separated from the body, and the more the labor can be done by others. Painting is the only manual labor I do.
Marlene Dumas (catálogo da mostra coletiva “Painting at the Edge of the World”, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, EUA, 2001)
Flux and reflux. Containing and emptying. Presence and absence. Navigate and drift. The series of photographs that Marina Saleme is showing at this exhibition has the rhythm of the seas. It shares with the ocean a wholeness that decays and recomposes itself: like the wave, first it grows vertically, next it gushes horizontally. Come and go. It’s pooled liquid or paint that evaporates. It rises and falls. A jumbled crest, or spray in fervent dispersion. A small vessel sailing a set course or yielding to the current.
In touching the skin of things, she also touches their core. It’s a landscape without a horizon because it’s an inner landscape, which reorders the world based on the task of mourning. In probing the depths that lie ahead, she needs to carefully plan what should be brought to light. Setting the course. Sail time: the time taken by a boat from its departure until the port of destination.
Container and contents, the boat/eye/house/body sheds tears and drips blood. It’s a mineral fragment that sprouts and stands out from the white of the wall as though it were a living organism. An eyelid. It reaches the open sea and floats. It resists and is renewed. It opens itself and lets the red pain flow far away. It rides awash on the crimson torrent that is dissolved. It encounters other ships/wounds or comes ashore on the beach, empty and clean.
With these photos, Marina is painting. She revisits and subverts one of the most traditional genres in the history of painting: landscape and, especially, its subgenre of seascape. She switches tools but does not divert her focus. She does what I call reincarnated painting, that is, a pictorial reasoning supported by other materials and processes.
The artwork’s visuality is constructed through an ordering of vocabulary that artist knew how to break up and put back together with canvases and pigments. There is structure, rhythm and color. There are glazings and passages of light, transparencies, opacities and, even the overlaying of graphic signs that relativize the medium’s seduction. At the same time, another nature coexists in these artworks: that derived from their hybridization with the object and the performance.
Marina’s photographic works are nurtured in the pictorial tradition in order to reach another level: that of the subtleties of the concept. Unlike conceptual art, however, there is no unconcern for the material’s sensuality. It transubstantiates, evanesces from one body to exist in another, as reincarnated painting. For some moments, it leaves off from being stuck to the molecules of an organism to become pure energy in the cerebral synopses. The paint and its tonal densities also assume this immateriality made of energy, being transmuted into the electronic impulses of the pixels of the digital device to afterwards rest on the paper of the photographic copy.
The term “reincarnated painting” alludes to the constantly announced but never confirmed death of painting. It also alludes to the tendency for artists to work with the pictorial despite the wide shadow of suspicion that has fallen over it, all but banished from the contemporary world into a dusty cubbyhole of modernity. This term is directly linked with the healthy prolongation of life injected into painting by the multimedia practices of the current art scene.
If we trace a historic line through the successive announcements of the death of painting, we will see that the phenomenon has existed for more than a century. As has been pointed out by Yves-Alain Bois, 1 modernist painting has been living with this trauma for long, long time. As he states, “mourning was painting’s activity throughout the entire 20th century.” An activity, he notes, “that did not become necessarily pathological: the sensation of an end produced, above all, an irrefutable history of painting, of modernist painting in particular, which we were probably very willing to bury.”
For Bois, the vitality of painting “will only be tested when we are cured of our manias, our melancholy, and return to believing in our ability as agents of history, accepting the project to work in the midst of the end, instead of escaping from it through increasingly sophisticated defense mechanisms.”
Alexander Rodchenko was one of the first heralders of the death of painting to execute, in 1921, three monochromatic canvases (red, blue and yellow) and declare: “It’s utterly over: basic colors and each plane is its own plane. There is no more representation in painting.”
Mondrian also stated that his canvases – negations of the illusion of visual depth and of the image’s descriptive function – spelled the end of painting. For his part, Marcel Duchamp had an even wider destructive aim in creating his readymades, thereby turning the very idea of artistic practice inside out.
It was at the end of the 1990s that the apparent emptying of painting reached its fiercest moment of irony. This was when a pair of Russian artists, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, carried out an extensive opinion poll in the United States to determine the Most Wanted Painting. The winning image wound up being a landscape in realist style: blue sky, leafy trees, two deer, a typical American family in Sunday clothes and, in the foreground, former president George Washington.
This image was exhibited by Komar and Melamid in a golden frame and protected by an elegant red-velvet cord. It couldn’t have been more ironic. How far removed from the prestige that oil painting has enjoyed since it began to irradiate through the 16th-century European courts to become the treasure of museums that fascinate us yet today!
The most emphatic announcement of the illustrious death took place, however, at the beginning of the 19th century, with the invention of photography by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, in 1815. It’s curious that the reincarnated painting present in Marina Saleme’s oeuvre makes use precisely of photography to revitalize the pictorial universe. That is, to come full round in the breaking of the paradigm. Though they are apparently figurative, their aim is not traditional depiction but rather to connote, evoke and provoke an intimist delving, a recognition of the opposites that live within us.
Grouped in diptychs to underscore the passage of time and the existence of a before and an after, the set of artworks in this show is articulated in near-musical rhythm, with counterpoints between the inner in the outer; the constructed and the natural; color and line; memory and the ephemeral. Thus, alongside the horizontal image of a liquid and mobile surface flowing back from the sand there is another, vertical one, of a wall stained by moisture. There is the present existence and the past existence.
The concavity invented in plaster finds its double in the calm water sheltered between the rocks and the beach. The bucolic reflection of tangled stems of grass in water ruffled by a gentle breeze finds its pair and contrast in the scribbling done in charcoal on the white wall from which flows (a tear?) a translucent blue liquid. The borders established by green paint on the white wall seem to stretch onward, almost like the line of a seismograph, in the foam fringing the wave.
All of these artworks evince another link with the universe of painting: frontality. Even though part of the image is made from the construction of relief on the wall, this relief is only a step in the process that will result in the photographic record obtained in the finished work. Even though they stand out from the wall, transformed into objects, they do that exist as independent identities. They are syntagms within the bidimensional discourse established by the photos. They are nouns within a phrase.
Still in the way of pictorial syntax, these photos contain an overlapping of planes that recalls the practice of glazing in painting, as well as the process that the artist began to manifest in 1988, in a series of artworks in which she glued sheets of newspaper one atop the other, establishing within this accumulation various interventions involving both drawing and painting as well as sharp incisions into the thickness of the material. Procedures that,
transposed into her painting, establish a duality between the seductive composition that springs naturally and the necessity that the artist feels to cancel this visual facility, introducing dissonances in the harmonies of the forms and colors, pointing out that there is no perspective and that the elements float or sink on and within various levels of perception.
“I am always doubting about what I am doing, I began my artworks based on this doubt. I only consider an artwork finished when it seems that all was lost, when I destroy and afterwards reclaim. When I do painting on top of painting. I need this tension of being on the edge of the abyss. It’s hard to work when I don’t feel this dizziness,” the artist observes. 2 In her photographic diptychs, the abrupt changes of plane are used to tension the seduction of the landscape. The use of an element foreign to the context (the boat/eye) strengthens the intended artificiality and reinforces the character of this medium, which is nothing more than a mechanical record of the real but always winds up as something more than this.
It was by forcing our retina to constantly adjust from close to far, even when faced with extreme frontality, that Marina created her work of pictorial maturity: the enormous Goela [Gullet], that took up 17 meters of an unforgettable wall at the Centro Universitário Maria Antonia, in October 2001, as part of her solo show Sobre Poças [On Pools]. Another artwork of exceptional quality shown on the same occasion, Alice Espelho Meu [Alice My Mirror], left no doubt that we were witnessing one of the greatest pictorial expressions of her generation. A generation that needed much perseverance to overcome the disenchantment with painting due to the meteoric rise in marketing and the gradual aesthetic decay of a large part of the values that arose in the 1980s.
Marina’s painting is characterized by (an absolute rarity!) full technical mastery without falling into the empty affectation that currently, and especially in São Paulo, often springs from blind obedience to the old and outmoded tenets of Greenbergian formalism. (Also) for this reason Marina’s work is vigorous and affirmative in a medium that is today generally anemic. By way of her studio production she affirms that painting is today more alive than ever. She moreover warns: painting is only alive for the painters consider themselves alive and not mere executors of established recipes.
The metaphors in this show are clear, even though they were made with the delicateness of a whisper rather than by loud statements. This time Marina did not use an operatic scale even though her aim was grandiose: to reflect on the human’s place in the world, to try to encompass the immensity of the task of existing. Underlying this is a necessary ideal: to run out of tears and live together with the powerful presence of an absence. It’s as though the wounds/pools of her painting were detached from the canvas to be washed/taken away by the sea.
In establishing new frontiers for her work, the artist demonstrates, in parallel, the full viability of a contemporary pictorial project, with traditional materials (oil on canvas) as well as processes and resources specific to the current era of digital images.
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1. The essay “Painting: The Task of Mourning” in the catalog of the exhibition Endgame: Reference and
Simulation in Recent Painting and Sculpture (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT Press, 1986).
2. Stated by the artist to the author, in July 2003.