Cristina Canale​
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Milton Machado | 1990
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Cristina Canale’s landscapes are the motifs of her painting but do not derive exclusively from her rational thought. The material she layers successively onto the surface of her work is abundant, thick, and pasty, and her brushstrokes are gestures committed from the outset to the forward-looking vision of someone who wants, and expects, to see mountains, valleys, rivers and waterfalls from afar; and, from up close, flowers, aquatic plants, butterflies, and even whales. All leaping from a sea of formless oils into the perceptual net which, starting at its first glances at the blank canvas, the viewer’s eye has already prepared to capture images. The canvases the artist chooses, woven by machine in some faraway factory, are sometimes predestined collaborators in forming the composition, providing her, so to speak, with the threads of the yarn. Circular brocades can, for example, serve as a static base for a future whirlpool of waterfalls; marks and reliefs in the background can emerge on the surface as textures of epidermis, scales, topmost skins. The density of the material is sufficient to gain complete perceptual autonomy, in and of itself. Furthermore, were it not for the many references gathered from books and magazines, photographic cutouts that approach views of primal nature, precise oriental prints, the wildly multiplied horizons of Guignard, so many natures composing a fragmentary world (not absurd in themselves, but absurdly pinned to something like a bulletin board where one might expect to find water and power bills), Cristina might stop, halfway or further along, at abstraction. She, however, uses the medium of oil painting to seek identifications with real images of her (p)reference, painting landscapes not of abstraction, but of extraction. They are not properly seen; rather, they are mines of material that the eye excavates.
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The catalog from her 1987 exhibition at the Centro Empresarial Rio reminds me of how her landscapes of that time were less inhabited. If there was anything floating in the air or flying in the sky, they were depictions of rough, concrete geometries — organic inhabitants such as cross-shaped three-dimensional boxes, spheres, pyramids, as though in an endless process of consolidating the sea waters and buildings, clouds of air and mountains, in the same rigid solidity. Any more dynamic inhabitant that was daring enough to project itself there would likewise have been destined to the same total immobility. Yet, it seems that Cristina’s nature or natures run counter to this foreshadowed constructive possibility. Currently, her brushstrokes are more fluid and always gestural, and the directions they take are strictly by and for description. A river that flows down the mountain and out into the sea, although it is depicted radically, with upstream brushstrokes, will nevertheless be rendered as naturally as possible: it is a virtual river, of oil on canvas, but insists on being a river of waters that cannot contradict gravity and which will find their inevitable sense of horizontal rest in the sea. Here the waterfall literally falls, vertically. Around the base of the mountain, the oil follows the echoes of the same outlines that real water would, when curving around a real mountain. This is why I say that these paintings, at least in their nonabstract instance, are governed by topographies. They avoid topology.
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In her studio here next door, on Rua Teresópolis, in the district of Santa Teresa, Cristina shows me two of her recent works, Jardins and White Lilies, and suggests that they could have roots in the Ninfeias series of water lilies, as she talksto me about Monet. This distant genealogy is indeed worthy of examination. Before that, however, there are more amusing associations, between Cristina’s panel of cut-out natural incongruities and the artificial aquatic garden that Monet, by diverting the river Epte, created, planted, and painted in Giverny: they both needed to create, by deviations, their own models, models of the world. For his part, the impressionist Monet learned to see through transparencies au plein air, directly from nature. Capturing the motion of the winds, gradations of light, undulations, reflections, and watery mirrors, he got tired of navigating the river Seine, as depicted in a painting by Manet. Cristina Canale navigated other channels. Her atmosphere is urban, and her first courses, also divergent, were in economy. Surrounded by paints, far from the natural elements — not splashed by the spray that drenched Monet when he tied his easel to the rocks of a cliff —, Cristina learned to see the transparencies of painting directly from painting. It’s true that she uses chromatic notes to construct her spaces; that she avoids using black tones to darken areas of color in shadow; and that she eschews limiting her compositions to the rectangle of the canvas, instead appropriating slices of nature, of the continuous scenes that stretch beyond the painting’s frame, “one of the about twenty rectangles that could be cut from a 100-meter-long panoramic canvas” (Cézanne, talking about Monet). Lessons that she learned, that we learned, by heart, about color, from impressionism.
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In these genealogical associations, one might find a possible abstract instance in these paintings. In these gestures and accumulations of color, the shapes only become figurative, when they are inevitably recognized through our visual memory. They are not drawn — there is no drawing here — they lack outlines; they are masses-of-color-light-in-themselves, not apparent colorations of objects illuminated in this way or another. In tribute to Cristina, in further tributes to Monet: the painter brushes her chromatic notes without questioning which objects they correspond to. Even though she is not an impressionist, Cristina Canale still paints according to luminous impressions.
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Text published in Verve, no. 34, April 1990 (column Visuais), and in Galeria, Revista de Arte, no. 18. São Paulo, 1990.
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