Between times and spaces

There are a few indications of paths to travel through the works of Fernanda Valadares in Depois: [After:], an exhibition currently in the final days of its run at Galeria Mamute in Porto Alegre. It begins in the spaces between the metal cubes placed on the floor, continues along the line that seems to traverse painting by painting along the walls like a vast and distant horizon, and concludes with the title of the series gathered there: Migrações [Migrations]. Yet, crossing through all of this, there is still a prior path—the poetic key to the project. It is the more than 1,000 kilometers between Porto Alegre and São Paulo that Fernanda, a São Paulo native based in Rio Grande do Sul, travels with some frequency by car, experiencing the landscape in its distance and duration.

The desire to establish relationships with time and space in a way that reflects back in her work is a constant in her output, which is marked by contemporary painting with a strong conceptual weight. This has been clear since the series Fernanda created starting in 2007—the year she moved to Porto Alegre—with her silent environments composed of floors, walls, stairs, doors, windows, columns, and passages. These are constructions of planes that are always empty and devoid of detail, turning architectural elements into a kind of constant figurative motif. In these works, there is an engagement with painting that seems interested in playing with the laws of perspective, yet without losing its three-dimensional illusory effect; on the contrary, that effect is heightened in an exercise of near-abstraction. However, the lines remain there, demarcating the planes within the canvas. Hence, a state of "being between" figuration and an abstractionist tension.

Alongside this intellectual procedure, there is, of course, the material itself, worked through the ritualistic practice of encaustic painting, which binds the work to the duration of this ancient process. Fernanda almost always uses marine plywood as her support, which in her works often reveals small fragments of the wooden surface in the form of tears, fissures, and incisions.

– "The choice of materials I use and the encaustic painting technique itself are very important and direct much of my work. Encaustic consists of wax, pigment, heat, and time of execution. It is applied while still warm, brushstroke by brushstroke, and then subjected again to a heat source. In this way, the work is constructed layer by layer," relates the artist, who has written about the technique, defining it as a "process of being in the present."

In the works she presents now at Mamute, Fernanda continues her interest in establishing relationships between time and space, but unfolds this line of thought with the idea of a "displaced present." Migrações is based on the internal resonance of her personal experience of being in motion—remembering what has passed and projecting what is to come. This involves both the route traveled between POA–SP and the transits the artist makes while in each city, whether those journeys are physical or mental.

The lines that form the aforementioned tears in the painting are, in their genesis, an interpretation of the horizons of the landscapes Fernanda observes during her trips between POA–SP—a journey in which, as she travels, the artist finds herself between places and times, in the passage from a past to a future, in the condition of one who perceives themselves in a void, like an interval of a "non-place" and a "non-time" to be lived.

– "There is the time of making, the duration of the wax, our own lifespan, times we wish we didn't have to spend... I always have this question of 'being in the present' versus wandering, strolling through the past, through a hypothetical future. Wandering, which is temporal as a memory of the past, is also spatial. Memory does not account for the space traveled, only for time. So, if when I am in one of the two cities I am internally moving between them, when I am actually in transit between them, where am I? In the present, or in one of the two? Or in a void, a no-place? Being in the present on the road revealed itself to be in a void—a broad void. This broad present interests me," comments Fernanda.

This sense of the present interests the artist so much that she created another work, Gravidade [Gravity], which gives its name to the five oxidized steel cubes installed in the exhibition Depois:. Inside them are paintings that emulate "the landscapes" of the paintings from Migrações presented in the gallery space—an environment also viewed by the artist as a cube. Thus, she makes it as though one work fits inside the other, Migrações and Gravidade, paintings and cubes, like a metalanguage presented in the form of an installation. One of the cubes, which appears completely open, became that way due to the impact caused on the ground after being dropped from the sky.

– "If Migração is this horizontal path, what would it be like if it were vertical? Gravity would exist. And what would it be like to 'be in the present' along this vertical path? Well, to find out, I had to run the experiment: I dropped the cube from 500 feet. What I understood is that the end of the path is inexorable, imprints an irreversible transformation, and happens very fast."

By directing her work by combining the inner time of an existential thought with the slowness of the archaic practice of encaustic painting, Fernanda overlaps spaces and temporality that point to many paths—traversed or yet to be traversed—in works that derive their contemporary strength precisely from this intersection.

DEPOIS > Exhibition of paintings by the artist Fernanda Valadares. Galeria Mamute Entretenimento section of Zero Hora (Rio Grande do Sul) - April 29, 2015 - 10:18 AM