Cristina Canale
Casa Roberto Marinho, Rio de Janeiro
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Felipe Scovino | 2024
The late 1980s in Brazil were a mixture of anticipation and euphoria. After twenty-one years of dictatorship (1964–85), the country was reconstructing its democratic foundations in the shadow of what had been an intense process of repression and fear. Rock music, the rejection of moralism, and the celebration of liberty—made manifest in the end of censorship and the return of political exiles—marked the cultural scene at the time. Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1961, Cristina Canale was among those still shaken by the trauma of the military regime’s violence even as their enthusiasm was aroused by the prospect of rebuilding society. Her painting Rio 40 graus (Rio 40 degrees), 1987, turns toward the iconic landscape of the mountains of Rio, but from a perspective in which the city and its abundant nature appear transformed. With its intense reddish tone, the work evokes a mood of chaos. The bay resem-bles a great desert of blood, as if everything that we used to recognize as an idyllic landscape had transformed into its very antithesis. This space of uncertainty also finds echo in Cachoeira (Waterfall), 1989, a painting in which nature makes itself present in a relatively somber way. The cascade is depicted in thick waves of paint, and its somber palette evokes a disquieting and sullen atmosphere. In the ’90s, now based in Germany—another country trying to reckon with its traumatic history of repression—the artist turned from panoramic visions that command the landscape to more focused views that penetrate the very interior of nature. Platane (Plane Tree), 1995, and Strand, 1998, despite their diluted and uncertain forms, reflect a less threatening vista, thanks to the swaying balance between the weight and lightness of leaves, as well as to the artist’s selection of a softer palette. One might also say that a spirit of solitude moves Canale’s work of the ’90s. As her color becomes warm and the character of the paint becomes diluted—in addition to the oil paint she’d been using, she employs acrylic and oil pastels—the human figure seems to disap-pear. The paintings reflect a state of waiting, as we see, for example, in Poltrona anos 60 (’60s Armchair), 1999. The empty chair turned toward the spectator creates an impression of stasis, or of a movement that is as close as possible to the immobility that occurs when one asks: What is happening if nothing happens? Canale’s work of the past two decades turns toward the feminine with a thought-provoking paradox: The female figure becomes the pro-tagonist, but she is featureless, anonymous, perhaps undergoing some sort of punishment, as in Ella (Her), 2018, or Paixão (Passion), 2023. In these two paintings, moreover, the body is made explicit and erotic. The erasure of identity in the context of solitude seems to be an expres-sion of protest, and the artist’s portrayal of female sexuality, even in a time of incessant sexual violence, is an evocation of political agency.
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