Who’s that girl? [1]
Galciane Neves | 2023
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The seminal essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,” written by the professor, writer, and art historian Linda Nochlin, poses a bombshell question.[1] Upon reading it, many of us working in art felt compelled to become experts, scrutinizing narratives and historiographical methods, challenging them until they shriveled. Yes, Linda, we took your bait. The danger of this single story, as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2019)[2] cautioned, still exists, lingering as truth. Linda Nochlin invites us to consider women’s professional practices within the art system, the conventions of artistic production labeled as feminine, the standing of women artists, and she offers us tools to navigate the many “womanhoods” in art. Her words expose the anonymity, subjugation, and lack of recognition that limit us. They highlight gender inequalities in the workplace; the daily struggles against the violence we encounter in a world where gender equality still seems an unattainable dream; the agendas of a struggle that should not be exercised solely by, with, and for women. Regrettably, we still yearn for the obvious: the recognition of our political, social, and cultural contributions that can secure our ability to live freely.
Nochlin’s question, which resonated before the 1970s and is becoming progressively more difficult and painful to address, is presented here as a means of proposing a reflection on the language of a woman artist who paints portraits of women and other subjects. If Nochlin challenges the methodology of a historiographical construction that predominantly relies on the accomplishments of an absolute figure—themale creative genius—perhaps we can consider and query the specificities of research, production, and reflection on women artists. It is important to emphasize that this perspective does not include the categorization of a feminine style, one that relies on alleged feminine expressive traits or on superficial and stigmatizing adjectives (such as delicate, sensitive, “here comes a long text,” and other sexist expressions that tire us). On the contrary, in order to explore the experience of poetic creation by women, and by Cristina Canale specifically, we aim to put forth questions that are informed by her creative gestures and her body of work.
With this in mind, let us introduce two more questions that align and root themselves in the discursive dynamics presented in Nochlin’s text. Who is she who paints? And who does she paint? These questions can be imagined as mirrors, reflecting debates that ripple between them. Is it here that we would fall into the chasm of self-expression, as many suggest, where all artistic judgments are deemed to arise solely from the artist’s experience of the world as a woman, within her specific social markers, and possibly criticized as self-centered? Could that pose an issue? To some extent, yes, but in some cases, no. Nevertheless, this lens does not seem to efficiently apply to Canale’s work and the focus of our discussion here.
We certainly aim to deal with the complexity that constitutes artistic creation, the peculiarities of gesture, the many possibilities of pictorial storytelling, the myriad narratives born from painting, and the universes that women inhabit in their creative process—how they look at things, dare to apply different ways of seeing, and paint what they see, allowing themselves to be filled with numerous references and visual dialogues. Circling back to one of our questions, who is Cristina Canale?
The artist began her exploration of painting by studying Japanese art, Jackson Pollock’s work, and proposing alternatives to the classical model of landscape creation. In doing so, she enriched the complexity of her paintings through the layering and overlapping of elements. Her landscape does not demand a horizon. As noted by Fernando Cocchiarale, the artist’s birth and upbringing in Rio de Janeiro greatly influenced her work and contributed to her way of looking at the world. According to the critic, her paintings “absorbed the curves (the bay, beaches, and lagoons), the reliefs (hills and huge rocks), and above all, the spatiality (the system in which these traces or forms are organized).”[3]
Canale’s journey has been significantly shaped by her social, cultural, and artistic context. After moving to Germany, the artist shifted her focus to a more diluted and fluid approach to pictorial material, bringing herself closer to the objects and the environment she engaged with, consuming them more viscerally. In the 2000s, there was another important transformation in her trajectory. Canale began to confront chance conflicts, which she has no intention of resolving, between figuration and abstraction, as well as between narrative and a temporal openness to nonevents. These conflicts continue to resurface in her work, manifesting in multiple ways as language. Mountains, waterfalls, forests, seas, flowers, and fruits that emerge in enlarged detail, as well as in aerial or distant views or unlikely cutouts, are all rendered through color amid patches, splatters, and drips. Color is the foundation of these landscapes.
Gradually, these landscapes began to be inhabited by people and animals. There seems to be no clear boundary between the characters and the background. However, the desire for color creates spaces-bodies and spaces-landscapes, which nourish each other. In this setting, we step into their atmospheres, touching our way through them, as if we were looking with the tips of our fingers. Shapeless or as markers of presence, the color patches suggest leaves, mouths, dogs, tiles, dresses, patterns on clothes, corners, and floors. Or could they be forests, tables, doors, cushions—or even all of them at the same time? This ambivalence in Canale’s pictorial images, which does not reflect a hesitation to construct details but instead allows the image to be influenced by the gaze and open to the public, can be understood as key to her work. The artist moves away from the relationship between the complementary meanings of form and content. Is the girl caressing the dog, or is it her hand blending into the animal’s fur? Where is the character wearing the patterned dress directing her gaze? Who is looking at the angry dog in the background of the frame? Could it be a wall texture merging with the painted images on her canvas? Body, space, objects: a landscape whose elements undergo metamorphic interaction, and, at the same time, characters that are places.
When she delves into what we recognize in art history as portraiture, Cristina Canale employs similar techniques to those she uses when working with landscape. Thus, it is not about a sudden shift from one painting genre to another, nor is it a matter of differentiating between processes within these distinct practices. Canale translates her procedures, creating language games that chart shifts and transmutations between hybrid zones of painting, allowing them to interact with and contaminate each other: the landscape that unfolds as a body; a body becomes part of the landscape; a portrait presents a face as color fields reminiscent of landscapes; a face emerges with topographies, reliefs, and curves.
In these portraits, Canale sketches and outlines cartographies. In other words, the face and parts of the figure’s body—like hands, hair, neck, torso—possess a chromatic eloquence that allows them to be perceived as territories, resembling aerial or perspective geographies, or as elements of the landscape—mountains, rivers, valleys, crevices, woods. Faces and their presences are color fields; often lacking outlines and devoid of lines, they are infused with color as part of their formulation. Their dimensions are typically on a larger scale. Could a breast covered by a hand also resemble a lake adjacent to a red expanse? Or is it an upside-down mountain, spilling soil over a red lake? Canale combines resources linked to the desire to paint landscapes with resources linked to the desire to depict a face/body in the landscape and as a landscape. She experiments with visualizing the body on the canvas as a territory. And its existence becomes akin to how places unfold, serving as the locus of our experiences. In this poetic scenario, Canale aligns body and place. Her linguistic operations perceive, engage with, and elaborate on a body and a face through the lens of the landscape.
Maria (2001) is among the works in which Canale unleashes her gesture for this interplay between body and landscape. In the portrait, set against a gradient blue background, the dark patch represents the figure’s hair. However, if we engage in an imaginative exercise, it can be seen as an island veiled by a cloud. The cloud hovers over the island while concealing the figure’s eyes. Could the gradient blue also suggest the expanse of the sea? And does the dark shape signify a rift in the landscape? In A árvore e o espermatozoide [The Tree and the Spermatozoid] (2022), the gaze is afflicted and disrupted by the excessive chromatic composition. A face/earth/ground receives the tree, which takes root there. This ground/face also allows itself to be infused with a red droplet. There are no boundaries between landscape and face. In Teach (2023), the procedure is distinct. A face devoid of eyes, mouth, or nose appears to stare at us. It is entirely covered in small dots, suggesting a cartography of sorts, as if each shade of yellow represented a place, a city, a border. Amid them, a pink circle stands out, and from it emerges a speech bubble, akin to those in comic books. As Canale hints, these elements serve as pathways to enter or exit the painting, or little breathers. Yes, everything is both body and landscape. Let us not dwell on our musings: Could these elements be escape routes or entry pathways into the body/place? Perhaps we can ponder: Are Canale’s portraits landscapes with escape routes and entry portals? And take notice: Hands, earrings, and eyebrows also fulfill these roles. Or are they reliefs, crevices in mountains, small craters?
Looking at these works reveals Canale’s treatment of the landscape as a body, meaning a landscape that is governed by the scale of the body, a body whose power emanates from its capacity to assume the role of a place and to be perceived as a landscape. Thus, in terms of process and perception, these artworks bring to mind the walking experience narrated by Rebecca Solnit, in which she intertwines her bodily sensations with the description of a landscape, possibly enraptured by a feeling of the sublime:
That circle became a world whose rules I lived by, and I understood the moral of mazes: sometimes you have to turn your back on your goal to get there, sometimes you’re farthest away when you’re closest, sometimes the only way is the long one. After that careful walking and looking down, the stillness of arrival was deeply moving. I looked up at last to see that white clouds like talons and feathers were tumbling east in a blue sky. It was breathtaking to realize that in the labyrinth, metaphors and meanings could be conveyed spatially. That when you seem farthest from your destination is when you suddenly arrive is a very pat truth in words, but a profound one to find with your feet.[4]
What a beautiful connection: perhaps it is necessary to bid farewell to words too, to be present with the body in a state of portraiture, to gaze at it in its spatiality, and to perceive it as territory, thereby turning it into a place, a dwelling, a landscape. When talking about language, the dialogic interplay between body and landscape in Canale’s work elevates them both to significance within the pictorial space, molding them into visual elements that captivate the gaze, inviting reflection and a process of elaborating the body and landscape: body as landscape, landscape as body. And their meanings flow amid these elements without settling, without requiring a rigid definition. This leaves us wandering among these elements: at times body, at times landscape. Merleau-Ponty can offer a potent key to understanding Cristina Canale’s works. He puts forward a proposition for the body that seeks to contemplate painting and vision and how their phenomenological relationship unfolds:
My moving body makes a difference in the visible world, being a part of it; that is why I can steer it through the visible. Moreover, it is also true that vision is attached to movement. We see only what we look at. What would vision be without eye movement? And how could the movement of the eyes not blur things if the movement were blind? If it were only a reflex? If it did not have its antennae, its clairvoyance? If vision were not prefigured in it? …
The enigma derives from the fact that my body simultaneously sees and is seen. That which looks at all things can also look at itself and recognize, in what it sees, the “other side” of its power of looking. It sees itself seeing; it touches itself touching; it is visible and sensitive for itself.[5]
The second question (who does she paint?) has been gradually intertwined here with the discussion about Canale’s use of an inseparable connection between body and landscape in many of her portraits. However, another layer is added to this question through a note found in one of the artist’s notebooks. On one page, three circles are marked as ellipses. This punctuation has inspired the poetic license used below, which is also deeply influenced by a character of Canale’s, whether portrayed or still to be portrayed: a woman with braids and an unsettling gaze. Red rays emanate from her wide-open eyes, piercing through two other faces. “unpowder gelatine, dynamite with a laser beam.” These words orbit her face on the notebook page. And the question reshapes itself: Who’s that Girl? Below her face, within a neon-green triangular zone that could represent her clothing, lies what might be the answer: “She’s a killer queen.” Like a provocation, the phrase describes the character who leaves almost no trace behind, only red rays. It is from this face that we continue our journey, weaving her story, the story of a body-landscape.
Notes:
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[1] Title of Madonna’s song, which is on the soundtrack of the eponymous film (1987). The film’s plot portrays the story of Nikki, played by Madonna, who is falsely accused of murdering her boyfriend. After serving her sentence, she is on parole and meets a man who has been tasked with ensuring she gets on the bus back to Philadelphia. Nikki convinces him to help her find those responsible for her imprisonment. While searching for the culprit, they fall in love after many adventures in New York. In one part of the song that follows the chorus/question, Madonna sings: “When you see her, say a prayer and kiss your heart goodbye / She’s trouble, in a word get closer to the fire / Run faster, her laughter burns you up inside.” It is this girl, who could be so many of us, and who is embodied by so many of us, though each with a different life story, that we want to talk about when we look at Cristina Canale’s characters.
[2] Essay originally published in ARTnews (January 1971), https://www.artnews.com/art-news/retrospective/why-have-there-been-no-great-women-artists-4201/.
[3] Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story,” TED Conferences LLC, July 2009, www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.
[4] Fernando Cocchiarale, “Entre a ordem e o ícone,” in Cristina Canale (Rio de Janeiro: Barléu Edições, 2011), 18, our translation.
[5] Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (London: Granta Books, 2014), 18.
[6] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie, trans. Carleton Dallery (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 162.