The seventh continent

The contemporary world is driven by constant acceleration. Communication technologies enable the circulation of a volume of information at a speed never seen before. New scales of measuring time are created to try to numerically grasp what human perception cannot reach. Nanoseconds and picoseconds are part of a technical vocabulary disseminating into our daily lives—and which, being so abstract, come to be understood as a metaphor for the speed of life, for the passage of minutes, hours, days¹.

Fernanda Valadares offers us the exact opposite of all this. Her work demands time. It asks for the eye to become sensitized, for the whole body to pause. Whether starting from vast horizons or constructed planes, the artist invites us to slow down, to listen to the silence, and to try to understand why the notion of the sublime seems no longer to make sense today. It only seems so.

In the Himalayas series, we traverse mountain ranges on an invented continent. In this particular geography, reality and fiction permeate each other, while fullness and immensity meet. In Fernanda’s work, it no longer matters to know which place the monumentality of that landscape corresponds to. It is the details that make her mountains any mountain and, at the same time, unique—a place that exists for the artist and for those who allow themselves the moment of perception, where all of today's virtualization materializes. And which, in its materiality, triggers memories of an existing natural architecture: an absolute and sublime space.

From this seventh continent, a mental state, other possibilities emerge. In it, silence speaks and communication occurs through infralanguage². Here, meanings are not fixed, but shift from one reference to another, letting the images speak for themselves, allowing exchanges to establish themselves with each encounter. Like Fernanda, who shows us space to speak of time. And speaking of time, she makes us experience it, for only thus can we experience her work.

Even when the artist depicts interior spaces, as in 23º35'17"S 46º38'13"W and 23º34'15"S 46º42'18"W, gaps predominate and what is not present appears. The large format and the absence of color leave room for contemplation and reflection. For Fernanda, emptiness is not the same as nothingness. It abstracts noise and configures possibilities for the visible.

In this imaginary continent, seconds stretch out. And on her mental map—whose primary dimension is time—the dreamlike quality allows us to transcend form and technique toward questions bordering on metaphysics and (why not?) politics. May we understand another way of dealing with contemporary reality through physical immersion in the artist's work and poetic thought, seeking a way of being in the world that extrapolates the compressed scale of nanos and picos toward a simpler and more affective existence. May this constant flow of images slow down until we have the possibility for moments of pause. And may we, even when confronted with the weight of this volume of information—visual or otherwise—breathe with greater lightness. Because it is from this notion of lightness that we manage, through contrast³, to understand the weight of every object, action, thought, atom.

Thinking about this weight is fundamental for Fernanda, someone who continuously leans over the material to melt and fuse layers of wax. Even if she sees herself as a painter and makes encaustic her primary medium and support, this exhibition allows us an immersion into a much broader universe. Wood and paper as material acquire symbolic weight, showing us an artist of complex poetic and expressive reflection. Here, too, there are layers to be unveiled. In this seventh continent, subtly outlined on the tip of the graphite, there are no limits or borders. Everything is possibility.

¹ VIRILIO, Paul. Negative Horizon: An Essay in Dromoscopy. Continuum Publishing, 2006, 227 p.

² LATOUR, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press, 2005. [Portuguese translation cited in original text: Reagregando o Social. Uma Introdução à Teoria do Ator-Rede. Salvador: Edufba, 2012; Bauru, São Paulo: Edusc, 2012. 400 p.]

³ CALVINO, Italo. Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Harvard University Press, 1988. [Portuguese translation cited in original text: Seis propostas para o próximo milênio: lições americanas. Translation by Ivo Barroso – São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1990.]