Cristina Canale: The Part for the Whole
Victor Gorgulho | 2023
When readers have this publication in their hands—sometime in the latter half of 2023—we will be on the cusp of entering 2024, marking the celebration of four decades of artistic production by Cristina Canale (Rio de Janeiro, 1961). Through notes, reflections, and various loose threads, this essay seeks to convey distinct desires and intentions, akin to tentacles, to celebrate Canale’s artistic journey from 1984 to the present day.
While there is an underlying desire in this publication to delve into the pictorial production of portraits that the artist has dedicated herself to in recent years, there is also the undeniable intention to revisit past moments in her career, (re)introducing her work to both new and seasoned audiences in the art world. I aim to inspire fresh reflections on the various narratives present within the artist’s body of work from the last forty years. Through uncertain routes, meandering lines, and unpredictable brushstrokes, I intend to sketch new perspectives on the luminous path that Canale has forged thus far. This essay is divided into two parts, commencing with the artist's process of making.
The 1980s and the early 1990s
How many generations can coexist within one? It is not even necessary to be intimately familiar with the intricacies of recent decades of Brazilian art history (and stories!) to have come across the widely recognized term “Geração 80” [Generation 80]. The expression originated from the title of the exhibition Como vai você, Geração 80? [How Are You, Generation 80?], which took place at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage in Rio de Janeiro in 1984 and was curated by Marcus Lontra and Paulo Roberto Leal. While there was undoubtedly an intention to bring together the diverse painting practices of numerous young artists under a single conceptual “umbrella,” it is crucial that we revisit that historical moment not to deny it or something similar, but perhaps to examine it through a more discerning lens, from plural perspectives, acknowledging the multitude of artistic desires that coexisted at the time. Certainly, many practices could be (and were) categorized within a single theoretical-conceptual framework crafted by the exhibition’s organizers and contemporary critics. However, many others were undeniably poetic, somewhat unique, or even divergent from the overarching statement. These practices may deserve special attention today to prevent them from being overshadowed by the historical specter that we continue to refer to as Generation 80.
In Canale's practice in the early 1980s, the artist divided her time between studying economics at university and taking art courses at Parque Lage. During this period, drawing took precedence as a conscious and deliberate choice. Her experiments unfolded on paper, typically on a small scale. The works oscillated between a desire for a less overt representation of different landscapes and the early emergence of a somewhat semiabstract, semi-figurative aspect that would characterize her practice in the years to come. Without fear or hope, it didn’t take her long to venture into the realm of painting in the first half of the 1980s. In doing so, she not only confronted the existential void that comes with a blank canvas but also began to delicately and calmly explore the myriad material possibilities of paint. Describing it as “matter-paint” is by no means hyperbolic considering that the artists associated with Generation 80 spared no effort in using both oil and acrylic paint in thick and heavy layers, producing works that often revealed themselves as dense experiments, frequently guided by a singular overarching creative impulse: the desire for expression, derived from the assimilation of various languages and pictorial currents that had circulated in the international art scene, both in the years leading up to this period and during this very era.
In 1987, Canale held her first solo exhibition at the Centro Empresarial Rio, where she openly described her works as reflective of her practice at that time, stating that “everything is very mixed.” Art critic Frederico Morais wrote a brief review (the artist’s first critical text) titled “Cristina, the Fighter.” According to Morais, the twenty-five-year-old artist was grappling with the challenges that confront every great artist who dares to face their fears and insecurities in the emptiness and silence of their studio. Canale, as we now know, never ceased to fight. “As I stand before her five large canvases on display, I sense this impasse, but also her determination to surmount it. In other words, both her testimony and her painting underscore that the act of creation remains a painful and demanding process. Indeed, there exists a ‘physical struggle’ between the artist and the canvas,” Morais wrote, justifying his use of the term “fighter” in the title of his review. He was not mistaken; time, naturally, bore witness to the outcome of this struggle. Within Morais’ metaphor, which is as direct as it is humorous, it is safe to say that Canale emerged victorious from the contest.
Primarily working in tandem with her peers—many of whom Canale counts as friends and lifelong artistic partners including Beatriz Milhazes (1960), Daniel Senise (1955), Luiz Zerbini (1959), and others—the artist began producing large-scale canvases where a prevailing desire for landscape seems to shape the overall presentation. Here, it is appropriate to use the expression “desire for landscape” because, despite her thematic and formal alignment with her peers, Canale’s so-called landscapes rarely resulted in bucolic scenes reminiscent of the typical modern landscape representation, nor did they respond to the immediate memory of the urban landscapes that surrounded her. Perhaps there existed a certain point of departure between Canale’s practice and that of her generational companions. While she shared in the dense and thick use of materials on the surface of her paintings, she diverged in that unconventional references began to dictate her unique “desire for landscape.” “I would throw paint on the canvas and let it flow, then I would define what interested me,” the artist explained in an interview with the critic and curator Fernando Cocchiarale in 2015. This was how, through a productive fusion of theoretical-visual references, Canale immersed herself in a wide spectrum of references ranging from Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) to Japanese art, from Claude Monet (1840–1926) to Alberto da Veiga Guignard (1896–1962), from Renaissance painting to Gerhard Richter (1932). But first, she embarked on a transatlantic journey that would redefine the directions and contours her work would take from that point forward.
In 1993, somewhat convinced of her dissatisfaction with the direction her artistic practice was taking in Brazil, the artist set her course for Düsseldorf, Germany. There, with the help of a scholarship she had received, she embarked on a period of study and production under the guidance of the conceptual artist Jan Dibbets (1941). To avoid delving too deeply into this initial period of her stay in Germany, I will be concise: although Dibbets made numerous contributions to Canale, it was ultimately the artist herself who metonymically discovered solutions which, while seemingly simple, required this phase of maturation and inquiry, between Brazil and Germany, to fully reveal themselves and finally bloom after a long oceanic journey. Among these discoveries was a reunion with one of the fundamental elements in any drawing or painting practice: the line. This became the subject of subsequent experiments by the artist, who, at that juncture, sought a radical simplification of her praxis, creating works that often led her back to the starting point of drawing. Paper, watercolor, lines, stains. It was necessary to distance herself in order to find the most subtle nuances in her gesture, the erratic execution that yielded lines that, even when disjointed, guided the artist to a new place within her practice. “God writes straight with crooked lines”—the popular saying, despite its tongue-in-cheek tone, seems to fit perfectly here.
From the second half of the 1990s to the present day
Zooming forward, furiously bridging the transatlantic distance that separated Brazil from Germany, South America’s perpetual sunshine met the paleness of European faces and landscapes in Canale’s work. At the time, when the idea of the so-called “old” and “new” worlds still lingered in the collective imagination, these labels not only became blurred but also collapsed in the artist’s presence. It was through a bold leap she undertook—venturing far beyond the guidance and paths suggested by her male mentors and peers in the European art world at that time—that Canale, as early as the mid-1990s, seemed to discover not only resources and procedures (a term cherished by her Generation 80 counterparts) but also a well-defined path toward a visual language that allowed her to traverse the canvas’ surface in a radically different way to anything she had explored until then.
Perhaps it was an indirect effect of the waters that Canale crossed when she ventured across the ocean; perhaps it was a moment of optical-conceptual revelation. The fact remains that the material density characterizing the artist’s paintings from the 1980s to the early 1990s gave way to another texture, one marked by significant liquidity. It was as if her experiments with the simplicity of lines and stains on paper and canvas all converged toward a single objective: the dissolution of what had previously seemed almost like solid rock, raw and impenetrable. Especially in her works from 1995 onwards, Canale inaugurated a new relationship with her paintings. In the eternal struggle alluded to by Morais, rather than employing heavy gestures, she allowed her hands to only guide the paint, letting it flow and gently spill across the visual plane. Instead of becoming preoccupied (or even terrified) with the apparent need to fill the canvas background or give sinuous prominence to the figures that had been part of her repertoire, Canale began to catalyze, liquefy, and solidly dismantle everything she had been practicing relentlessly in her painting. Thus, a new visual language and, why not, a new artist emerged.
The concept of “the part for the whole,” as the title and hypothesis of this essay suggest, aims to elucidate a central element of the subsequent changes and new procedures that Canale began to incorporate into her paintings, particularly in the latter half of the 1990s. While we previously discussed how the artist started to engage differently with her backgrounds, it is within the frontal section of the pictorial plane—the space inhabited by the figures created by the artist, often abstract forms reminiscent of the botanical or vegetal world—that an apparent “void” appears to allude to a conceptual key capable of unlocking multiple pathways within the artist’s process. These sections, typically taking on oval contours (whether more or less circular or slightly deformed), began to receive increasing attention and care from Canale. Once again, they assumed the metonymic character frequently found in her painting, conferring such weight and significance to a specific section that it could speak for the entire pictorial plane on its own. I refer to this kind of pictorial procedure as “the part for the whole.”
Initially, these forms seem to be a response to the refinement process that Canale’s paintings underwent from the early 1990s to at least its midpoint. In works dating from the end of that decade, we see the artist experimenting with the possibilities of enigmatic, ghostly figures that become recurrent in her paintings. These spectral forms take on unsuspected yet utterly compelling contours as the artist imbues them with the figurative outlines of chairs, pools, skirts, trees, faces, and various related forms. Herein lies the radical assertion that Canale’s painting embraces, bridging the realms of abstraction and figuration. Her paintings lay claim to deliberately hybrid territories, comprising both spheres of pictorial creation, coexisting in complete harmony and singularity, a testament to the artist’s true process of maturity. Whether more or less abstract or more or less figurative—such distinctions will matter little from now on—Canale’s paintings fascinate us both for their “parts” and their “whole,” even though both dimensions evolve in parallel within the artist’s practice.
Finally, as this publication seeks to shed light on the artist’s portrait practice among other objectives, I conclude this essay with a brief and whimsical contemplation of this series of works. It would not be inaccurate to assert that the faces represented by Canale, often devoid of eyes/mouths/noses, are (also) a consequence of the discovery of those oval-vegetal-deformed figures that she began exploring from the mid-1990s onwards. However, upon closer and prolonged observation, the faces in her portraits share something astonishing with these forms in Canale’s body of work as a whole: just as the seemingly “empty” sections of her canvases are far from innocuous or purposeless, Canale's faces are also more than mere corporeal structures awaiting the artist to bestow upon them the forms they may appear to lack.
I dare say that we are then struck by an epiphany: Canale’s faces undoubtedly have eyes, mouths, noses, and many other forms. Perhaps the mastery of the artist’s process lies in convincing us of the notion of an apparent void—how foolish of us! The truth is that it is only we who are unable to see such forms depicted there. The crystal-clear eyes of Cristina Canale constantly see them, as if they had never ceased to exist, perfectly outlined on the surface of her canvases. The so-called “fighter” painter that Frederico Morais identified in the young artist in the mid-1980s was, and will continue to be, a remarkable practitioner of the physical, cerebral, theoretical, mystical (and many more layers) exercise that is creation in the boundless field of painting. Let us remain attentive to her forthcoming brushstrokes: whether they are visible, invisible, opaque, translucent, apparent, saturated, pale, or otherwise.
Victor Gorgulho is a curator, journalist, and researcher. He graduated in journalism from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and holds a master’s degree in literature, culture, and contemporaneity from PUC-Rio. He has curated numerous individual and collective exhibitions in Brazil and abroad, working with artists from different generations. He co-organized, along with art critic and curator Luisa Duarte, the book No tremor do mundo – Ensaios e entrevistas à luz da (Editora Cobogó, 2020). He has contributed to publications such as Folha de S.Paulo, El País Brasil, Terremoto, VICE, and Jornal do Brasil. In 2021, he was a guest curator for the second edition of the Pivô Satélite program at Pivô Arte & Pesquisa. Starting in 2022, he assumed the position of chief curator at the Instituto Inclusartiz in Rio de Janeiro.