Solombra / Shadowe

Solo exhibition at Galeria Quadrado Azul, Porto, Portugal

From November 16 2024 to January 18 2025

text accompanying the exhibition by João Sousa Cardoso

The Laws of Physics

Luísa Jacinto's research has developed in the exact tension of an Ariadne's thread, exploring the supports of painting, the quality of the plane, the interaction between the drawing of the line and the sensation of colour. Moving between small-scale work and large-format painting, between the invoking of figuration and the values of abstraction, between opacity and translucency - harking back to our primal vision that understands light and coloured before discerning shapes - between materialism and spectrality (the phantasmal, the sublime, the spiritual), the artist explores the archipelago of ambiguous regions of perception to the fullest poetic extent.

Building on the issues addressed in Shining Indifference, the artist's recent exhibition at the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT) in Lisbon, Luísa Jacinto takes a deeper look in Solombra at the interdependence between the phenomenon of light, the experience of colour and the ballast of absences. And you can't help but remember Solombra, the last book by the Brazilian poet Cecília Meireles (“I am that person whom the wind tears, etc.”, published in 1963, the year before the author's death), in the unique voice with which - in the midst of the modern adventure - she brought back the intense presence of living things. Or it reminds you of a passage in Vita Contemplativa by Byung-Chul Han that Luísa Jacinto gave me to read, between a visit to the studio and other exchanges. Praising the slowing down of everyday life in the global economy, Byung-Chul Han quotes Paul Cézanne on the subject of the painter's fundamental craft: “All his will must become silent. He must silence all the voices of prejudice within himself, forget, forget, be silent, be a perfect echo. Then the whole landscape will be reproduced on his light-sensitive plate.”

In this new exhibition, which meditates on colour and obscurity, Luísa Jacinto silences the voices within and welcomes us with a long frieze of small, crated, mute paintings arranged along the two walls of the entrance corridor, face to face. The works produced between 2022 and 2024, all previously unseen, differ in technique (oil, acrylic, spray, embroidery) and support (linen, cotton, polyester canvas) but repeatedly focus on the marks that disturb the smoothness of the pictorial surface: scratches, creases, wefts, crumples, splashes of paint, picot, stitched thread and the graphic impression of a motif repeated like a succession of photograms (on a canvas entitled Cinema). Each canvas refers to a summary conflict or a dramatic synthesis between the plane, the texture and the suggestion of perspective; between the atmospheric (or aqueous) character and the concreteness of the materials. They are micro-landscapes of transfers, displacements, wanderings like ours, following in step with the rhythm of this double-entry frieze.

Once we reach the centre of the gallery, we are confronted with a succession of paintings on rubber membranes suspended from LED tubes and resin nets, arranged in the emptiness of the room, participating in a perceptive game of aerial diagonality made up of openings, overlaps and crossings.

In her approach to expanded painting (in the broad sense of a pictorial activity moulded in the three-dimensionality of objects and space), Luísa Jacinto installs the chromatic planes - bifaces, both in the paintings on membrane and in the nets - in close dialogue with the nature of the supports (in the case of rubber, keeping the memory of the original liquid state and pigment-impregnated material that has received successive layers of colour, solvents and varnish, producing a painting that is autonomous from the wall, consubstantial, undifferentiating front and back), the specific architecture of the space that houses them (“to make painting with the gallery space”, the artist describes) and the spectator's body, inviting them to move around each painting-object, evoking the experience of sculpture.

Much has been written about the “diaphanous veils” and a certain volatility of Luísa Jacinto's painting and – without losing sight of the meteorological density of this work, which evokes some of the temperament of William Turner's late period – there are other gravities – “without tragedy”, the author explains – that engender this work in its driving force.

Prior to other qualities, Luísa Jacinto is an artist of workshop experimentation who investigates the elements in their possibilities, their behaviour in the course of the creative process and their physical limits, modelling the conduct of the scientist in laboratory observation. Her concentration on the molecular idiosyncrasies of the supports recalls the experiment with paint contained by the lead wire “between” glass in Marcel Duchamp's La Mariée Mise à Nu par ses Célibataires, Même (1915-1923), the seminal work of object painting that has become a paradigm of contemporary art. While Duchamp's painting without a face or a reverse turned into a proto-installation by taking in the representation the whole of the surrounding space and the imponderability of occurrences (including the accidental shattering with which it was “definitively concluded”), in Luísa Jacinto the translucency of the rubber membrane (with the thickness of tiny millimetres that don't crease), the suspended elements, the lighting provided by the supports and the nets frame and reinterpret the whole theatre of the spectators' presence and mobility. Luísa Jacinto's painting apparently dealing with a theory of colour, systematically questions the pre-existences of architecture, the body of the actors and the details of anatomy.

Contributing to the active dismantling of the stable surface of painting in the Western tradition, Luísa Jacinto's skin-painting (the soft canvas) and net-painting (the ossified web) describe, in addition to the unfathomable gradations of colour, the determination of the tenacious gesture of cutting. And they make manifest the harsh line of shadow that divides chromatic sensation through the diffraction of light, on the one hand; and the laceration, the blade of the blow, the suture through drawing, on the other. Solombra is therefore a threshold of perception, an intangible door to the mysteries of the tactility of the act of seeing and the desire to see with rigour in order to better understand the signs of painting, the sensitive space it generates (immediately rhythmic) and the aesthetic condition of its material limits.

If in several of the small paintings in the entrance frieze we see stretched cloths that bear the traces of folds and creases from a previous, traumatic and unexplained state, appearing to have been crumpled (echoing the massive metal sheets violently deformed in the workshop in a previous series of works, where Luísa Jacinto discovered the technical term “torture”), in the large canvases in rubber membrane, the fold is once again presented as an insidious motif, recalling the notion of pli (fold) with which Gilles Deleuze updated the interstitial forces of the Baroque moment, in all the combinatory of divergences, dissonances and polyvalences of the infinite “fold upon fold” that crosses the ages. The LED tubes that support the canvases in Solombra (a load-bearing structure in several works at MAAT), arranged parallel to each other, now open up an interior space to the malleable and redoubled canvas in the suggestion of the archetypal form of a shelter or a para-architecture. Or, on the contrary, these bodies simply allude to a clothesline of washed sheets drying in the sun and beaten by the wind on the balconies neighbouring Praça das Flores where Luísa Jacinto keeps her studio in Lisbon. This precise painting unites the scales of time, warning that everything echoes everything.

The memory of colour studies in the underlying wave of impressionism that links Claude Monet and Joseph Albers to the values of American colour field painting or the specialism of contemporary artists such as Sam Gilliam or Katharina Grosse are rediscovered here in the tendentially cool, corrosive palette with a citric acidity ( underneath the faded colouring of the rubber skin itself), heralding the unrestrained fluidity of colour and the experience of submersion. The alluvium, a recurring figure in Luísa Jacinto's repertoire, is also connected to the abstention of the gesture and the mark of the brush, diluting the Renaissance fixity, abstracting from the hand, rescuing the archaic and moving vision of colour in its changes, inviting the relative and relational in the dissolution of forms.

Close to the surface of the metal, the photographic emulsion and the solvent elements, between retention in the void and the imminent fall, significantly resisting the photographic record, Luísa Jacinto's work summons the mirage, the trepidation, the reflections and the draggings, in a certain tradition of impressionism moulded in the industrial sequentiality of a new condition of the world at speed, from the modern perception of the landscape through the train window to the generalised dispersion of vision in the age of digital mediality.

In this work between languor and tension, the filmic and the quiet, in the double breathing of the right pauses between circumscription and openness, the redoubled canvases, the pulled weave of the nets, the haptic character of the textures and the voluptuousness of the forms contradict the first degree in which they appear and instead describe a densification of the atmosphere, less mild and timeless. And rightly so, transhistorical.

Luísa Jacinto studies the Laws of Physics against the a priori of the school gaze and the restraint of cultural systems of perception, finding in the carpentry of making that experience is subjective, realities polycentric and truths contradictory. And that it is in the interval between the evanescence of the screens and the tight mesh of this fabric of materials with its roughness that we ultimately identify the founding place where raw power, labour without opinion and that “perfect echo” (in Cézanne's expression) of the spark of reality are rooted. And - in the deceleration of attention to which Luísa Jacinto's work invites us - the vital possibilities of a certain experience of vertigo, clean and serious, for the wandering spectator.

João Sousa Cardoso, 2024

All images © Filipe Braga