With some drawings scattered on the bed, Ana Matheus Abbade (1996) and I were talking about landscape, light, air, darkness. The clouds in her works seemed to vibrate through the folds of the sheet, whose relief shaped the surfaces of rice paper in her recent works. A light breeze passed through us, penetrating the fibers of the sheets and pillowcases, bringing into the conversation the memory of the atmospheric landscapes of Alberto da Veiga Guignard (1896-1962).
The verticality of Abbade’s charcoal works evoked the elongated landscape cutouts of the older artist, absorbed by Asian aesthetic references that, like Chinese painting, are partly identified by their astonishing ability to perform, with voids and watercolors, the invisible presence of air.
While for Ana Matheus the proximity between her works and Alberto’s paintings was quite surprising, for me the relationship between them had the flavor of an old friendship. Knowing Abbade’s interest in volatile matter (evident in her previous installations with glass, acetones, and hormones, such as Mona da Boca) and, that day, witnessing the fine layer of black dust that, impregnated in the drawings made with fusain, gracefully settled on the whiteness of the studio walls and floor, in my eyes, the landscapes of Ana and Guignard seemed to magnetize each other.
Despite their different contexts and eras, the two artists share the challenge of representing and performing the humidity, density, and opacity of the air. While Guignard took the skies, clouds, and mountains as a starting point to investigate, through the genre of landscape painting, the forms of impregnation and continuity between beings, times, topographies, and atmospheres, Ana Matheus has been interested in the same subject using charcoal.
It is with this dry yet dense material that the artist has composed atmospheric drawings that approach the facture of painting, facing the problem of the stain from the experience of the powder – which arises as the artist imprints gestures of force and mystery on a sheet of rice paper until the charcoal is exhausted, dissolved in masses of darkness and traces of the action of her hands, fingers, and nails.
Her compositional gesture is one of continuity. Forms emerge in the space-time of the transformation of the sticks into the volatile cloud of charcoal that spreads and settles on the surface as the artist rubs those pieces of burnt wood on the strips of rice paper that currently cover the walls of her studio in São Paulo. Through the weight of her gestures, Ana strikes the plane, continually making and unmaking forms that sensually intermingle with her own body; reciprocally impregnated by the incorporeality of the carbonized cloud it produces.
In this process, in the composition of works from the series Serpents in the Mangrove (2024), Nocturnal (2020), or Forest (2023), Abbade has also continued her research on incision, cutting, and other forms of inscription on the surface. If, over the past few years, the artist has approached this issue from the idea of transition where the nail becomes a knife – relating the cut to the non-binary gender experience and its social and political implications in the face of cisnormativity, exemplified by the photograph Nails Will Tear Cities (2016) –, in her recent works the incision itself has fascinated the artist as an aesthetic and political perspective in relation to the material of the world and bodies.
It is in this horizon that Mira Schendel (1919-1988) and Abbade meet, both interested in the graphic and ontological nature of what is expressed through the marks of their passage and action on paper. By producing traces in the form of subtle grooves, even if not always gentle (as evidenced by the tears in the works of the artist from Rio), through monotype or drawings that approach engraving techniques, Abbade and Schendel seem, as the former says, “to measure the world by the nail, from here to there.” Thus, among the phenomenological dimension of light in the work of Guignard and Abbade, Mira equally engraved a place for her dialogue with Ana’s work, both sensitive to what is openly ontological within the unstable phenomenic dimension of life.
The strength of Schendel’s graphic grooves found, in this small exhibition, a profound correlation with the way the artist from Rio has transformed all parts of her hands, as well as every millimeter of charcoal and even the agency of paper, wind, or humidity, into compositional devices. A compositional policy that is, in turn, implicated in the way the artist has experimented with the constant (re)invention of her ways of affecting and being affected, as she writes in her diary:
“I exist for the work-to-be, thus it is a record of my intention, my intervals with the place I inhabit, and I exist solely in this interval space between the porosity of the sheet that deposits charcoal intensities by weight, and the permeability fluttering in a dissipated form as if makeup on the skin, and the charcoal, placed by hand, like the tongue is to the dental arch, the wood is firm in ballast and dissolves in the record of a gesture, tensioned in the daily exercise of inscribing a code, a secret in another language, not mine, nor another, pulsations, vibrations, codes of sound pulsations and the stain of the materiality that remains, making the thing alive, with its own past, its accumulated and transferred past records. They relate like those who love, so much connection disjoins.”
As Ana Matheus reminds us, there is something of love that is realized through the air – that which crosses and connects Abbade, Alberto da Veiga Guignard, and Mira Schendel in their ways of inhabiting and making poetry with the void, with the wind, with the clouds, with humidity, and other cosmic mysteries in which we are immersed.
Among landscapes and monotypes, the three artists caress fleeting materialities and give relief to the invisibles that surround and constitute us: “love and the pure gas around me,” as Ana notes in another page of her diary.
Clarissa Diniz