Exhibition "THE BONES OF THE WORLD" | Brisa Noronha

BRISA NORONHA - THE BONES OF THE WORLD

 

Kiki Mazzucchelli

 

The bones of the world¹, Brisa Noronha's first solo exhibition at Galeria Sé, brings together a new group of porcelain sculptures and paintings that dialogue and complement each other in the exhibition space. Central to the artist's practice, the use of porcelain in sculptures characterized by an apparent fragility, by organic forms, and by the impression of gesture on the material, appears here, for the first time, as a three-dimensional response or manifestation of a research that has developed from painting. More than a methodological choice, this process was due to the limitations imposed by the pandemic and the artist's consequent lack of access to the equipment needed to produce the porcelain sculptures. During this period, Brisa Noronha turned mainly to painting, finding there the principles that unfolded in the works that make up the present exhibition.

 

It is important to emphasize that Brisa Noronha is an artist who does not start from preconceived ideas or projects. Her practice, on the contrary, is characterized by intuitive making and the constant clash with materials, from which emerge forms and images that always keep some ambiguity, not exhausted in unilateral readings. The paintings presented in The bones of the world combine a set directly based on the cinematographic universe of the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) and others that take as their starting point the artist's personal photographs.

 

In the first case, Brisa Noronha selects film stills in which she identifies framings in which the composition of scenographic elements and scene objects offers the visual material that will be reworked in the painting. These images go through a kind of decanting or reduction process in which the artist retains and only a few selected forms that are transposed and synthesised in the pictorial field. Curiously, many of the objects reproduced on the canvases are pots, vases and other domestic utensils whose forms constitute the basic vocabulary of porcelain; a vocabulary that serves as a starting point for the artist's sculptures.

 

As in Eleonore Koch (1926-2018), Brisa Noronha's pictorial work comprises the genres of landscape and still life. Both explore, also, the voids and the essence of forms, in sparse compositions that dispense with the human figure and the narrative content. But while in Koch we observe the relentless study of colours and contrasts, Noronha's painting employs a subtle palette, in which pinks, greys and pale beiges predominate, approaching the coloring of a Morandi (1890-1964). There is undoubtedly something metaphysical about these paintings. This quality is further emphasized by the mysterious titles that accompany them and that are nothing more than the texts of the subtitles that appear in the selected frames of Tarkovsy's films, thus constituting an operation of readymade that adds a certain dose of humour to these works by means of the mismatch between image and title.

 

In The bones of the worldthe paintings coexist with the three-dimensional works in a dialogical manner, establishing a kind of virtual space or scenography in which the sculptures are inserted like characters in action. Eggs, nests, jars, candlesticks and chapels are some of the recurrent forms in the artist's sculptural production, and here they reappear in new self-supporting arrangements and in a floor work consisting of dozens of pieces in different formats(Capela-caverna-tumba e os castiçais devigília, 2021). As in the painting, Brisa Noronha's sculpture explores the essential forms: the gesture of joining hands that results in the egg, the semi-elliptical form that is at the same time chapel, cave and tomb, the pot - basic and universal utensil in the development of civilization and fundamental form in the learning of ceramics - that, inverted, becomes shelter, home, place of protection.

 

These are monochromatic and fragmentary works, improbable compositions formed by the enchainment of different parts in which ideas of verticality - a primordial characteristic of sculpture - and collapse seem to coexist in constant tension. In contrast to the solidity of materials such as bronze or marble, the artist always works with this inherently fragile material, which she shapes with her hands to obtain organic and elemental forms that bear the marks of the gestures imprinted on the matter. With their whiteness, fragmentation and scale, these sculptures are reminiscent of objects found in archaeological excavations. But not only that: they are works that suggest the prospection of the origin of forms that are the expression of some of the most fundamental instincts and impulses of the human species: creation, shelter, death, among others. The bones of the world.

 

 

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Opening
27/11/2021 (Saturday)
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