Jandyra Ramos Waters

Jandyra Ramos Waters (Sertãozinho, São Paulo, 1921). Painter, sculptor, engraver and poet. Began her career making figurative paintings. Considered one of the pioneers of abstractionism in Brazil, her compositions work with the concept of symmetry and contrasting colours.  

After completing secretarial and English courses, he travels to Europe in 1945, to work for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) as a member of the Brazilian team helping the victims of the Second World War (1939-1945). After this experience, he settled in Sussex, England, where he fulfilled an old dream: studying painting. His first lessons were taken at the County Council Art School, where he made his first painting, a still life, in 1948.

In 1951, back in São Paulo, he resumed his art studies on courses in sculpture and ceramics with André Osze; engraving with Darel (1924-2017) and Marcelo Grassmann (1925-2013); art history at the University of São Paulo (USP); and painting with the Japanese painter Yoshiya Takaoka (1909-1978), from whom an influence on the colours and light in some of his figurative canvases is perceptible. 

He had his first exhibition in 1956, at the 21st Salão Paulista de Belas-Artes in São Paulo. The most common themes of his works of this period are landscapes, floral still lifes and domestic scenes in which signs associated with female care, such as an iron in Sem Título (1957), stand out. 

His figurative phase, however, lasted only a few years. In the early 1960s, he made a brief incursion into informal abstraction, producing quite matte canvases, with thick layers of paint, and a bold and luminous research of colours, combining yellow with hot pink, orange with blue, for example. The preference for a contrasting chromatic palette accompanies Waters throughout his career, in different phases.

At the end of the 1960s, he took part in important group exhibitions, such as the 9th Bienal de São Paulo in 1967 and the 2nd Bienal Nacional de Artes Plásticas da Bahia in 1968. At the same time, he experienced a phase of transition from organic abstraction to the rationalisation of colour and the geometrization of surfaces. Her canvases filled with organic forms - reminiscent of coloured paper cut-outs, like the technique used by the Frenchman Henri Matisse (1869-1954) - bring out the ambiguity between figure and background. She continued to work with these organic figures in the 1970s, but in an isolated manner, in wood cut-outs, creating boxes with low relief. This action was repeated in the Metamorphosis series of sculptures in the 2000s. 

Gradually, starting from a desire to simplify and organize forms that emphasize the relationships between colours, Jandyra makes room for geometric abstractions, as in the composition Pseudo-projection (1970), a superposition of two wooden pieces, painted pink and blue on a fendi background. His geometric compositions, which reveal a deep interest in symmetry, suggest an internal movement of forms intensified by the contrast between colours. The critic José Geraldo Vieira (1897-1977) calls this constructive phase of his "neo-Mondrianism". 

Like the painter Piet Mondrian (1972-1944), Jandyra works metaphysical issues with mystical references. The combination of lines, colours and geometric shapes seeks harmony through a relationship with the sacred, as in the series of three-dimensional objects Temple (1982), in which the artist explores in her geometry the sacred and the metaphysical in vivid colours. 

Although from the 1970s onwards she dedicates herself to works with concrete characteristics, according to the curator Denise Matar (1948), "Jandyra, with her intuitive visual intelligence, is a constructive artist, but never concrete".¹. Firstly because she adhered to the geometric aesthetic years later. And secondly because her work is not guided by the rational radicalism of the artists of the concrete groups.
Besides painting, Jandyra dedicates herself to poetry and has three published books: Pedras Nuas (1974), Desvendador (1977) and Ritmo do Tempo (2001). Her poems, according to Denise Mattar, are like her plastic work, synthetic, but with many layers and possibilities of reading. 

Jandyra Waters, in her trajectory which began with figurative painting, explores the constructivist aesthetic both in flat form, in paintings, and three-dimensional, in wood sculptures. In her compositions, she uses shapes, lines and surfaces that induce movement, experimenting with these elements in combinations of bold colours that stimulate the perception of the viewer.

source : Enciclopédia Itau Cultural

Por: J.B. Goldenberg Escritório de Arte