Looking into the distance, looking again: Liberdade é pouco [freedom is little]

"...The evidence of the passage of time lies in the act of making. As a procedure, this process [of encaustic] is, in itself, the practice of slowing down, the reluctance toward the careless speed of the contemporary world, and the reminder of the inevitable finitude of everything that had a beginning." Fernanda Valadares

Extended time, waiting, a gaze that lingers over the near-void—because we face the absence of the human. The focus of Fernanda Valadares's work is constructions (and here, I appeal to the broad sense of the word): architecture and geology, geography and archaeology, fiction and documentation. And, on the other hand, it is a commentary on the world. Her chosen spaces are those that alternate between the claustrophobic interiors of buildings (where the primary source of the composition is always captured from images in the online universe) and the terrifying immensity of landscapes (always distant, always isolated, always uninhabited).

Chronology appears here through multiple approaches, from the most symbolic (or symptomatic) to the concreteness of the making. These are encaustic paintings, an ancient technique offered as a metaphor for this larger time, beyond our bodies: in execution, it demands patience, slowness, rigor, and precision in its craft; in existence (in its testimony of the world), art history allows us to trace its ancestral presence in works from the beginning of our civilization that remain intact. There is a property of the binder, wax, that defines the rarity of its results in painting. This seems to offer a clue to the artist's choice: the paradoxical effect of apparent transparency and the materiality it presents—overlapping layers that fuse together and reveal the archaeology of the work, its palimpsests, perhaps.

The commitment to this technique indicates a close link to her poetic proposals and dates back to earlier works that, in a way, unfold into those currently on display. The possible symbol of her choice (desire) could be her metal cube containing, inside its four faces, a caged 360-degree panorama painting. The act: ascending to the sky in a helicopter (in the manner of that bird's-eye view claimed in her work) and, from there, throwing the cube so that it opens upon colliding with the ground, allowing landscape to meet landscape (GRAVIDADE, 2014).

The structure of the exhibition plays the game of opening-confinement in a pendular movement that ultimately confounds our certainties regarding the two poles.