On the verge of the void

Fleshed out to their bare bones, architectural environments reveal their structures: floors and ceilings in dialogue, exposed columns and beams, walls meeting walls, passages disclosing new walls. On the agenda of representation, lines and planes create the illusion of a three-dimensional space. And then we notice the quietude of these macerated surfaces echoing in fragments of distant horizons. Constructed landscapes, isolated landscapes.

The refinement found in the painting of Fernanda Valadares (São Paulo, SP, 1971) involves the very technique she adopts: encaustic. In this remote and painstaking process, out of step with technology and the speed of our time, beeswax—the base for the pigment—is heated and applied to the support layer by layer. From the density of the material stems the density of the painting, which can manifest as thin and translucent, opaque and creamy, smooth or textured. Fernanda created her first works in encaustic in the 1990s, but it was only from 2007 onward that she adopted it systematically, governed by the temporality demanded by the technique and finding herself in her isolated studio, windows open to the sky. There, in a physical, mental, and spiritual movement, she has been rescuing and refining external and internal landscapes, experiences and memories: contemplation, understanding, essence.