ART-PRESENTATION: Solange Pessoa
Solange Pessoa emerged in the Brazilian art scene in the ‘80s, with sculptures, installations, performances, drawings and videos that dialogue with and remain in step with the avant-garde of the second half of the 20th century, marking the place of her poetics in relation to the artistic practice. Notably, the interferences of the artist’s work in nature and her relationship to tropical fauna and flora.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Blum & Poe Gallery Archive
The first solo exhibition by the Brazilian artist Solange Pessoa, who was born in Ferros, Minas Gerais in 1961is on presentation at Blum & Poe Gallery in Los Angeles. Pessoa’s work stands out for its density and abundance, giving onlookers the impression of being faced with an organic compound flush with the pulsations of life and or subdued in the calm of death; the material seems to be forever yearning to transpose the form in which it is contained. Pessoa is immersed in a tradition in which there is a tenuous line of control between automation and trance, between the conscious and the unconscious. In the same way that it delves deeply into humanity’s savage, animal core, Pessoa’s work grants us access to a place of forgetfulness – a primordial aesthetic which is revisited through marks made on rocks and scenes related to the human, plant and animal kingdoms. Her “Botânica” paintings recall those of prehistoric cave paintings and her “Mimesmas” sculptures conjure mollusk fossils or ancient tools of stone. This exhibition showcases multiple facets of Pessoa’s body of work, conceptual threads and motifs cultivated over the last thirty years. Eggs of clay rest on the floor beside bronze forms nested in leaves and human hair. Black sculptures shrouded in fabric, hair and bird feathers reach out from the walls like limbs of animate bodies. A series of Pessoa’s “Botânica” paintings hang on an adjacent wall, white silhouettes emerge from black backdrops yielded from Genipapo and Lineaca—native oils and dyes also used by indigenous Mineiro tribes for medicinal purposes and for body painting. On the walls of an outdoor garden, Pessoa installs a constellation of biomorphic ceramic figures. Her “Mimesmas” lay in the soil, they are large coiling yonic works made from soapstone, mined from the quarries of Minas Gerais, that replaced the European marble, is commonly related to Minas Gerais, much for its use in cooking and decoration utensils and especially for the use by the important sculptor, carver and architect of the colonial Brazil Aleijadinho. The title of this series makes reference to the action of introversion or returning to one’s self. The shapes resemble both the interiors of the female body as well as fossils, symbols of primeval life and the reptilian brain. These works derived from or mimicking biological forms, installed on the floor or in the surrounding vegetation rather than solely on clean white walls, call for temporal, terrestrial, and metaphysical frames of reference.
Info: Blum & Poe Gallery, 2727 S. La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles, Duration: 9/9-14/10/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.blumandpoe.com
