From the Body to the Form, from the Form to the World
Pollyana Quintella | 2024
For nearly forty years, Cristina Canale has been producing works that defy any single, clearcut interpretation, which are instead interested in the ambivalences that lie between transparency and opacity, narrative and silence. From matter painting to the line, from the line to the form, from the form to the world, her journey is built on the constant interaction between the production of the recognizable (familiarity) and the unfamiliar (distortion and the subversion of the very idea of signification). Insofar as it operates between the aim of constructing a meaning and bringing about its own dissolution, her repertoire invites us to engage with the figuration of things in the condition of their fragile and delicate legibility.
Having emerged as a member of the celebrated Geração 80 [’80s Generation] (whose mythification did not help address the singularities and differences within the group that composed it), her work quickly drifted to acquire characteristics all its own. Within a few years of leaving the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage [School of Visual Arts of Parque Lage], she migrated from paper cut-outs in the shape of human silhouettes to experiments with architectural forms and metaphysical symbols such as circles, crosses, and triangles, until finally arriving at lush mountainous landscapes of considerable visual appeal. At that time, the underpinnings of her work consisted of images from art history, preserved and filtered by tradition, along with images drawn from everyday life in an urban environment saturated with information and mass media. This framework was further enhanced by the experience of living specifically in Rio de Janeiro, a city-image uniquely its own. These first landscapes that Canale produced were already endowed with considerable physical scale and expressed a strong pictorial density, sometimes further reinforced by the thick fabrics that structure the canvas, brimming with texture.[1]
Despite the curves characteristic to Rio de Janeiro, they approach the repertoire of Chinese painting and Japanese prints (a lesson learned from the best works by Guignard), characterized by a misty atmosphere — which makes everything float before the eyes — and the perspective constructed with overlapping layers, with no horizon. The difference being, however, that in Guignard’s work, the mist served to foster peaceful contemplation, while in Canale’s, the dissolution, combined with echoes of German romanticism, imparts a certain unsettled tension to the forms. In some cases, mountains emerge from a watery background, as though we could observe their geological formation. In others, large drippings dominate the canvas, suggesting fragments of landscape only by means of a few patches of color. Her palette is inherited not from the somber and melancholic repertoire of an Iberê Camargo — in his own way an ancestral matter painter — but rather from a postimpressionism interested in vitalizing the shapes. The painting vibrates like a damp surface taken over by lichens, mosses, or grasses — life that spreads in its desire to encounter thickness and materiality. Finally, the worn image of the landscape meets up with pictorial knowledge in lyrical energy, affirming itself as something never fully established, but in continuous transformation before the eyes.
The choice of landscape, however, was not driven by a desire to emphatically affirm a cultural identity, a belonging to a specific place, or nostalgia for distant childhood memories, even though these instances are present to a greater or lesser extant. Even in the emphatic Rio 40º, whose title needs no introduction, Canale seems to simultaneously deliver the cliché of the iconic vista while also subverting it. By combining a Euclidean perspective with an aerial one, the painting leads the eye along a low-level flight, fueled by the fantasy of touching the blistering territory in the depiction. The technique of painting serves to raise the thermometer of the image to high temperatures, to remove it from its passivity, to make it burn like lava, irresistibly. We are led to affirm that every landscape is a social production, a subjective construction, and a symbolic territoriality. Therefore, reflecting on our surrounding environment is, above all, a means of understanding our ways of seeing. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty once stated, “It makes no difference if he does not paint from ‘nature’; he paints, in any case, because he has seen, because the world has at least once emblazoned in him the ciphers of the visible.”[2]
This approach to landscape, while still retaining something sublime and monumental, embracing the challenge of testing how far the eye can see, gradually gave way to a more intimate encounter with things. The works from the early 1990s are enormous close-ups reminiscent of Claude Monet’s late phase — which was revisited by the abstract expressionists — who was also a master in the Japanese lesson of suppressing the horizon, in his obsessive explorations of the artistic nuances of his beloved lake in Giverny. While Monet painted water lilies, Canale seems to have painted other species, sometimes resembling roses. The blue-green backgrounds of these canvases, sometimes measuring more than three meters, suggest aquatic environments where these plant types would never grow. Sometimes the flowers are floating, as if being carried by the water’s current, while they sometimes seem to be in some nonplace, difficult to comprehend. They oscillate between weight and lightness, visual delight and signs of decay, bordering on the genre of still life. We, the observers, no longer contemplate from a distance, but are rather invited to immerse ourselves in the canvas, whose scale challenges any conception of domesticity wrongly attributed to this painting and its motif, or to the place of the woman artist. Lacking margins and depth, such paintings by Canale amplify her praise of surfaces. And her floral motifs, more restless than those of the impressionist, spread to the point of converting what was once was a lake into a “wall,” as the artist herself likes to state.
Canale’s preference for this repertoire persisted until she moved to Germany in 1993, although her approach underwent radical changes, beginning with her physical conditions. In her new context, the artist no longer enjoyed the studio structure that had allowed her to paint huge, dense canvases. Instead, she took advantage of the speed offered by small notebooks. She moved away from the overwhelming visual experience of large formats to focus on a more nuanced and measured vision. With the small formats, sharp vision replaced the “peripheral” view, promising more active involvement. This period gave rise to the dozens of observational drawings and concise watercolors seeking to discover a line that had not played a significant role previously. Pursuing a certain essentiality of form, these works are simultaneously a whole and a fragment, and would serve as a compass for a less corpulent pictorial production, dedicated to outlines and luminous transparencies.
When her canvases returned to medium and large format, they still featured organic motifs, but were now more domesticated, filtered through an idea of ornament, much like art nouveau. The complexity of details that predominated previously gave way to a greater perception of color through the exploration of larger areas. Her dominant forms, although still recognizable, retained a certain supernatural strangeness. While Western art history recognizes in the line “the basic structure of the idea,” it is not exactly a method of reason-based planning that we are talking about here. The wandering line still holds some expressive and vaporous intuition, despite the desire to organize the world.
The artist’s paintings from the late 1990s evince this growing interest in the biomorphic form, with a fluid structure, expressing the principles of continuous growth and transformation found in nature. Once again, what is at play is not the imperative of the constructive form, for which a square must be a square — clinging to the fantasy of a transparent language that expresses everything, walking hand in hand with progressive rationalism. Rather, this involves the appeal of the ambiguous and shifting form, transforming before the eyes, simultaneously a cloud, an egg, a bubble, a shell, a sofa, a treetop. They continue to refer to the codes of the world, while casting them into a strange light. They are form-figures treated as spatial planes, sometimes so close to our eyes that they seem to float on the surface like stickers (a good example is the emblematic Poltrona anos 60 [’60s Armchair]). In other cases, the effective use of glazings suggests an experience of “shallow depth.” In a Matissean spirit, she makes generous use of light to illuminate objects, making them glow amidst the banality of the material world.
It is also remarkable how, from this period onwards, Canale transitioned effortlessly between indoor and outdoor environments, moving from a fragment of a living room to the gravity tugging at fruits on trees. These smooth transitions clearly evince that her aim is not to craft grand little stories, but rather to develop her own language. What connects these works is precisely the free-ranging analogy among these ovoid forms, as though it were necessary to keep testing them to exhaustion, altering their meanings according to changes in the surrounding context. As Jean Arp, the master of biomorphs, said, “Art is a fruit growing out of man like the fruit out of a plant like the child out of the mother.”
It turns out that there is indeed disorder in the world, but not a lot. In the early 2000s the artist introduced specific architectural elements into her compositions. These human constructions were more geometrizing, aiming to stabilize the construction of space and to ground the painting. Swimming pools, walls and fences, lines that delimit the terrain, various houses — with their well-demarcated lines they all introduce some depth and volume (if not an actual horizon), along with a space delineated in successive layers, which are fundamental procedures for the artist’s production.
In this same period, her freely shifting repertoire also gave rise to smaller-scale paintings featuring depictions of bags whose shapes are analogous to the silhouette of larger houses, as if commenting — in keeping with the artist’s characteristically good humor — on another scale of shelters. Upon closer examination, the apparently frivolous and feminine theme imparts to the composition a great deal of formal-visual density, with a strong abstract potential. It is no coincidence that experimentation with patterns and standardized shapes (triangles, bubbles, drops...) also begins to predominate, making the eye travel dynamically across the bouncing surface, highlighting the contrasts of color and the relationships between figure and ground.
From that point onward, her strict avoidance of narrative content eased, opening room for an approach closer to the genre of the chronicle. Her painting sought to speak other languages. Human and animal figures started to appear in the compositions, sometimes as entire bodies, sometimes as mere fragments — something rare in her work, except for her period as a student at Parque Lage. They pertain to a bourgeois domesticity whose details exude voluptuousness, emphasizing feminine mystique along with its codes and gender rituals — expressed in bows, printed dresses, dainty shoes, and crossed legs. Once again, however, these stereotypes give rise to a sense of strangeness and alluring enigmas, piercing the surface of the cliché. In Ella, we identify a woman with crossed legs, but the radically planar geometric pattern of her clothing makes her blend into the surrounding space, temporarily suspending her humanity. In many other cases, the absence of well-delineated facial features gives the figures a hard-to-define ghostly presence. They are neither abstract enough to be icons, nor particular enough to denote an individual.
Furthermore, despite the narrative atmosphere, there is no beginning, middle, or end to any conversation. Instead, what exists here are selectively plucked and fleeting moments, like dreams about to unravel. What is disturbed is the specificity of the moment the painting describes. The combination and contrast of different pictorial treatments make the image resonate through oblique temporal rhythms, characteristic of a space traversed by the retina, independent of the body.
The mid-2000s also saw the maturation of something Canale had been tentatively exploring since the previous decade: the desire for the painting to breathe like a living organism. This is why in these paintings there is no exact definition of the spaces between objects, but rather porous connections, which impart to the image a sense of potential movement, freeing it from the moment of its original source. Her brushstrokes are like fluid gestures, never enclosing the figures in their own form, reminding us that living things extend beyond the limits of their body, as in the patch of color that envelops the fox in Goodbye Logik. Some cases also involve a repetition of themes, as though seeking the solution for a still unresolved formal-visual problem, connecting forms from different phases of her production (isn’t the billowing skirt of Passante an echo of the ovoid forms we saw in the late 1990s?).
Something contained in those emptied faces, however, beckoned for further investigation. From the mid-2010s until quite recently, her production was taken over by a profusion of faces, as though the painting were giving up the surrounding context and scenery to approach its characters more intimately. Despite the massive presence of the face and the direct reference to how the genre of portraiture became conventional in art history, the issue of identity does not enter these works, as they lack any aim to establish an appearance linked to the classic meanings of expressiveness, individuality, and subjectification.
If there is anything of portraiture in these figures, it might arise from a vibrant and very particular use of color, which lights them up and enlivens them as subjects. Their compositions are full of geometricized aspects and patterns, displaying fragments of fabrics glued onto the surface (sometimes shuffling the relationships between figure and ground), acrylic textures, and suggestions of three-dimensionality that transform the fantasy of subjective interiority, presented by the face, into an outwardly moving process of becoming, a pure surface. We are closer to understanding the face as a support for an infinite number of masks, a polyphonic face, as it continuously opens the possibility of becoming an Other, instead of presenting an opportunity to define the Self. Giorgio Agamben states that “Language is the appropriation that transforms nature into a face. [...] The revelation of the face is the revelation of language itself.”[3] This leads us to think that what Canale is pursuing is the face of painting itself, gradually dissolved back into landscape.
Formed by decades of fertile questionings, this is a painting that is never reduced to text; one that always exposes the method of its own making, the way in which it becomes what it is, moving back and forth in the transit between constituting and deconstructing visible forms. In her case, the abstract aim has never run counter to imagination, as her solution is above all lyrical: it challenges the supposed translucent division between objectivity and subjectivity (so dear to the 20th century). It does so, not to affirm a romantic and idealized expressiveness, but rather to involve the observer in the very flesh of language. In a different context, Toni Morrison has stated that “imagining is not merely looking or looking at; nor is it taking oneself intact into the other. It is, for the purposes of the work, becoming.”[4] Here, at the core of the lesson of painting, imagination is finally tangible.
Notes
[1] This is the case of We Are the Children (1988), a painting made on gobelin fabric with rounded shapes in subtle high relief, which is sometimes confused with the profusion of brushstrokes on its surface.
[2] MERLEAU-PONTY, Maurice. Eye and Mind. Available at http://www.biolinguagem.com/ling_cog_cult/merleauponty_1964_eyeandmind.pdf.]
[3] AGAMBEN, Giorgio. “Il volto”. In: Mezzi senza fine. Note sulla politica. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1996.
[4] MORRISON, Toni. “Black matters”. In: Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage Books, 1992, p. 4.
Pollyana Quintella (Rio de Janeiro, 1992) is a writer, researcher, and curator at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo. She is a doctoral student at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) and holds an MA in art history from the same institution, where she researched the work of Brazilian art critic Mário Pedrosa. She has worked as an assistant curator at the Museu d Arte do Rio (2018–2021) and as an independent curator in collaboration with various Brazilian institutions. In recent years, she has written for periodicals from Brazil and other countries, with a focus on the relationships between contemporary art, visual culture, and politics. She teaches Brazilian art in open enrollment courses.