azulada
Azulada is the landscape at a certain distance and it is in this distance that the works by Lygia Eluf, presented in this exhibit, inscribe themselves. The landscape was always the raw material with which the artist creates. In her more known paintings and engravings, geometrical shapes rearrange themselves on the surface of the work, trying to translate the landscape in art. The colors, that insert an unimaginable element to the rigorous orthogonal structure of these works, dancing rhythmically between shapes, is a living testimony of the presence of nature in the work. The translation of the landscape in art is an exercise of discipline and rigor that creates a distance between the artist’s immersion in the world and the construction of her visual discourse. The result of this process is always an abstraction.
Those that follow the artist’s work, and know the rigor in which she operates her art, will be surprised by this present exhibit. In the paintings showcased, a subversive element infiltrates between their rigorous lines and the pounding presence of the world insinuate in their horizons. What is in front of our eyes while we scroll the gallery is fruit of the improbable encounter between the artist, a translator of landscapes, with Velazquez, Goya and with Spain. Lygia Eluf recently came back from Madrid, where she spent many months researching in an academic interchange program with the Universidad de Madrid, and this crossing through the other, through the cultural and natural landscape of that country became, for her, a subject of reflection.
The hours spent at Prado, observing Velazquez, an artist who made representation labyrinths the theme of his work, and Goya, who put his art at service of the representation of life, shifted the interest of the artist towards the processes of translation of the living matter of things in to plastic thoughts. If the works by Lygia Eluf offered us the world already translated in languages of shapes and colors, now we have beyond us the clash of experience and reason of which her works result from. Especially in the series of drawings in pastel that open the exhibit, we can follow the movements of this process of transformation of the art experience, from which she draws a new poetry. The rigorous respect for the flat surface of the paper, or canvas, that granted her unrestricted autonomy of her art in relation to the world, that made that art a world parallel to the experience of the real body of the artist in the landscape, now rips here and there, revealing the distances and the effort of the attentive eye that lays over the world to touch it. In these beautiful paintings, we have staged the drama of representation in itself. We, the spectators, are launched in this labyrinth that is the caldron of creative activity and are moved by the honesty and courage of the artist who, after creating her own worlds with such rigor and hard work, abandons them to dive again in the uncertain space where the endless scriptures about reality are forever elaborated.
Cláudia Valladão de Mattos
