Shining Indifference
View InfoSolo exhibition at Sala do Cinzeiro, MAAT Central, Lisbon, Portugal
curated by João Pinharanda
March 26 — September 2, 2024
images Pedro Pina and Bruno Lopes
text accompanying the exhibition by João Pinharanda
The diaphanous veil
Exploring derivatives from the historical experiences of monochromatism and American colour field painting by investigating the inseparable binomials of colour-light and support-space, the work of Luísa Jacinto (Lisbon, 1984) is a permanent process of experimenting with the boundaries of the language of painting.
In the present phase of her research, the artist gives colour its own body, thus separating it from the customary body of the painting, dispensing with the continuous surfaces of support—the rigid surfaces (such as wood, a wall or metal) or the tensed surfaces (such as canvas)—and ensuring it autonomy and freedom.
Material autonomy: by making colour inseparable from the new supports; spatial freedom: by exploring the spaces where the works are displayed. A scenographic dialogue is thus set in motion and we are choreographically involved in it—following paths that are simultaneously free and constraining, labyrinthine and open.
Luísa Jacinto further investigates some of her previous experiments: the question of colour—the ways of applying it and showing it, but mainly of integrating it into the space —is explored in a work—Everywhere / Nowhere, 2024 —consisting of two huge, delicate polyester curtains that have been spray-painted and embroidered (always on both sides). This piece operates as a pair of screens that move around the space and occupy it in the form of a suspended structure with a spiral format. Two dark chromatic patches appear inverted (a spherical cap at the top and another at the base of each curtain), enlivening the surface and the space. At the same time, the artist establishes a maritime horizon in embroidered lines (transposing a dialogue from the inside of the room to the outside landscape of the Tagus estuary), thus accentuating the dynamics of a group of pieces that flutter with the currents of air or the movements of the visitors around the constrained/distended space.
These curtains thereby establish a dynamic dialogue with us —in such a way that they can be understood as stage curtains that, in keeping with Hélio Oiticica’s “penetrables”, invite us to participate. Following this same tendency to interpose screens in the space, Luísa Jacinto also displays the beginning of new lines of work. In the first one, she creates supports of synthetic rubber whose most interesting features are their translucence, flexibility and the incorporation of colour (series “Strangers”, 2024). In the second, the artist tries to distance herself from the continuous surfaces of support by creating spatial “drawings” that are highly ambiguous—they are real networks, simultaneously two-dimensional and three-dimensional
(series “Work in space”, 2024).
The colour membranes from the “Strangers” series operate as stained-glass windows in which the light is retained—they counter the cold spirituality of glass, creating an atmospheric and tactile sensuality that reminds us of Turner’s subtle and mysterious colourist landscape painting; but they also suggest the experiments of the mystical representation of inner light and divine light in the medieval and early Renaissance retables. The placement of these works in space and their lighting add new scenographic solutions: each work from this series folds in on itself, enriching the effects created by the transparency, opacity and polychromy of the materials, and adding to the support material not just colour, but also an individual element of internal lighting consisting of a white LED tube that simulta- neously adds brightness to the ambient light and acts as a suspended support for the piece.
The “drawings” from the “Work in space” series consist of coloured threads of cotton and polyester. Thickened by layers of resin that make them harder, they simulate in the space the lines of a geometrical drawing on paper (the grids found in Op or kinetic art in compositions with strong vanishing lines); suspended, these drawings are simultaneously line, matter and colour—or rather, they are the material expression of the colour, drawings that can stand alone by themselves on the wall or initiate unlikely dialogues with the space and other pieces in the exhibition, either appearing inside some of them or creating games of shadow and duplication in the corners of the room.
With these two lines of research, Luísa Jacinto seeks to materialise the line and the colour in drawing and painting and to make them autonomous. In all of these works as a whole, there is a desire to assert the independence of the elements of painting in relation to our feelings and subjectivities — to the point of the artist giving the title Shining Indifference to the exhibition that brings them all together. But the powerful appeal that these works make to the participation of the visitors, the sense of strangeness that its elements (materials and light) arouse in us, the fact that the synthetic rubber membrane and the polyester fabric of the curtains challenge us to see through their surfaces, but then deny us such a sight or make it difficult to discern, or even the fact that the diaphanous veils that occupy the room fold in upon themselves and break, all of this offers us a scene that is open to the wandering gaze of each of us.
João Pinharanda