Exhibition "Wanda Pimentel: the nineties

Fortes D'Aloia & Gabriel is pleased to present the first exhibition devoted to the work of Wanda Pimentel (1943 - 2019) as the gallery's represented artist. The six paintings selected for this show are part of Pimentel's production throughout the 1990s, when the artist purified her pictorial palette and the use of figurative elements. During this period, Pimentel dedicated herself to employing even more rigorous lines in dark compositions that prioritized black, gray, blue and brown. The limit between the inside and the outside is shuffled into sullen environments that reinforce the feeling of oppression and confinement, a central theme in the artist's work. 

Box Clever
By Evan Moffitt

What's in a box? I am delighted with a box that Wanda Pimentel painted in 1994. Although empty, it contains much. In the centre of the canvas, where its grey base should be, there is only a void - perhaps a hole in the table underneath. But even this support is not what it seems: its edges are mirrored in the ceiling above, as if the whole frame were a choked roll of film. Or, perhaps, it could be a lid, another box covering up the smaller one. You can't tell where it all ends or even if there is a world outside the confines of the painting.   

Painting has been Pimentel's world for over fifty years, a world in which she has set herself strict limits. Since the early 1960s, her paintings have moved away from expressive gestures in favour of rigid geometries executed in saturated acrylic tones. Her flat surfaces seem almost manufactured, as if they were subject to the depersonalizing effects of modernization. Still, even if Pimentel sought to eliminate his handprint from his paintings, they are invested with a character as strong as the works of pop art of the same period. The artist herself is always around in her depictions of urban domestic life, usually not as a hand but as a pair of legs that intrude into the scene from our first-person perspective. She invites us to see through the eyes of a woman at once emancipated and alienated by consumerism, revealing gaps in the places where the rigid borders of late capitalism admit windows for private fantasies and introspections.

         Leon Battista Alberti, escrevendo em 1435, diz que a pintura é como “uma janela aberta pela qual o sujeito... é visto”. Como uma janela – ou, de fato, uma caixa –, uma pintura permite que nos movimentemos entre o bidimensional e o tridimensional. A pintura converte uma perspectiva plana e delimitada em um volume físico que segura o nosso olhar. Essa operação reflete a técnica usada por Pimentel para transformar suas observações de objetos e ambientes imediatos em pontos de vista incisivos de amplas condições sociais e psicológicas. Seu trabalho nos convida a explorar uma fenomenologia do aberto e do fechado, do vazio e do cheio, do sólido e do imaterial, do espaço ao nosso redor e do espaço em nossas mentes. 

In 1964, Pimentel was a 20-year-old bank secretary living in the Rio de Janeiro neighbourhood of Botafogo when she decided to enrol in Ivan Serpa's classes at the Museu de Arte Moderna. Serpa was a revered abstract painter, proponent of the Neo-Concrete movement of the 1950s. Although Serpa's mentorship and countless long afternoons spent in the MAM canteen with Rubens Gerchman, Antonio Dias and Cildo Meireles were important influences on Pimentel, she quickly forged her own path. In the short span of two years, she exhibited her paintings at the 1968 Salão Nacional de Arte Moderna, which made emblematic an emerging cultural turn towards brightly coloured figuration. The New Figuration was a sardonic reaction to the the newly established dictatorship, the culture of consumerism, and patriarchal society, making use of a flat, graphic aesthetic reminiscent of John Wesley, Tom Wesselmann, James Rosenquist, and Andy Warhol, albeit for much more radical political purposes. Pimentel, however, never paid much attention to pop art or British pop art, dismissing the movement as a celebration of the consumerism it sought so much to criticize. His pop feminist pop rejected patriarchy in all its forms, including the economic, cultural and military imperialism of the United States.

Thus began his series "Involvement", paintings of domestic spaces on the verge of collapse. Foams coming out of kettles and hairdryers jump out of the picture plane, as if in a state of frank revolt against their owner. The artist appears to us only as a pair of white legs, her feet extended in a position of indifferent repose, while the objects advance on her like Lilliputian soldiers. Although the fragmentation of her body and the intrusion of monstrous animated appliances add to the claustrophobia of these scenes, she herself does not seem to be noticing much of it. "Involvement" is perhaps best understood as an "entanglement". As Pimentel told Hans Ulrich Obrist in 2017, "the work is precisely about women involved with the objects of consumer society. There is an erotic relationship between this ordinary woman and the technology designed to domesticate her sex, but in that relationship she preserves her right not to consent. No matter how confined we feel looking at the paintings, Pimentel almost always offers us a possibility of resistance or escape.  

Faz sentido que, nos anos 1970, ela mudasse seu foco do claustro para o aberto. A série “Bueiros”, um dos seus raros experimentos em escultura, reproduz grades de bueiros que Pimentel encontrava em suas caminhadas pelo Rio de Janeiro (precedendo em vinte anos os ralos que tornariam Robert Gober famoso). Há algo de solitário na imagem de um bueiro, que você só vê quando está andando, ocupado, olhando para os próprios pés. Aqui, podemos pensar que o título da série brincaria com a ideia de orifícios do corpo bloqueados pelo heterossexismo. Nesses trabalhos, Pimentel reivindica para si, com penetrante engenhosidade, a prática do flâneur, o passatempo burguês masculino por excelência. 

A sense of transgression also characterises Pimentel's doors, objects she began painting full-scale on wooden panels in 1978. Similar to culverts, her doors promise to open onto private interior spaces. Doors, such as windows or box lids, are openings into something that would otherwise be hidden from view. Pimentel, therefore, frames the act of looking at art as an exercise in voyeurism. Holding the door ajar while rattling the keys, she invites us to look. 

In the early 1980s, Pimentel moved to a flat in Lagoa, from where he could see Rio de Janeiro's famous landforms: Morro Dois Irmãos, Pedra da Gávea and Morro dos Cabritos. Her little daughter learned to crawl, then walk, and finally run, increasingly taking over Pimentel's living and working space. She would then open the windows and turn her gaze to the dramatic views of Guanabara Bay. However, her paintings in the "Mountains of Rio" series from this time are strange compressions of this majestic expanse, which introduce dark, hazy skies made of indigo or black. Axonometric lines cut through the geological formations, often revealing streaks of colour, as if she were excavating layers of sedimentary rock. For example, the 1986 painting depicting Pedra da Gávea looks less like a landscape and more like an X-ray.  

These lines run through Pimentel's paintings of the 1980s and 1990s, evoking window panes and other architectural elements. More disquieting are his untitled tunnels of 1994: dark asphalt streets find their way into clear mountain hollows towards an infinite nowhere. Black, rectangular frames, tilted at different angles, seem to deliver us the impossible view of a flat in the middle of a road. Other small black rectangles float incongruously on the imagetic plane, denoting at the same time the flatness and the depth of the image. We could be facing the Túnel André Rebouças, near Pimentel's house, or we could be facing the abyss. 

The disconcerting interiors of the paintings in the 'Involvement' series seem to suggest that for emancipated women the bourgeois home is not enough of a refuge, yet the paintings of the world outside this domestic environment are equally alienating. Her tunnels and mountains position us on the other side of an architectural or geological enclosure, barriers that we can never cross without losing ourselves completely. The paintings of the "Monument" series, from the same period, glimpse those ubiquitous tools of state propaganda - granite statues or concrete bases - as shadows emptied of their historical content. In an untitled painting from 1994, the object could be a man's bust or a hand in a fist. The plaque that appears beneath it is as black and inexpressive as its silhouette. Behind it, a fence separates us from grey, jagged steps (or perhaps a roof) that mirror the rocky teeth of a mountain range. The work has nothing of a sympathetic homage, but it does present a keen premonition of danger. Pimentel finished this painting almost a decade after the fall of the dictatorship, but the pain of that enforced silence stayed with her. Perhaps making anonymous the totems of state violence was her way of elaborating the trauma.