Balanço

The Poverty of the Self

The Opulence of the World.

The Opulence of the Self

The Poverty of the World.

The Poverty of Everything

The Opulence of Everything.

The Uncertainty of Everything

In the Certainty of Nothing. 

Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Making implies destruction – and therefore contradiction – in Luciana Maas’s work processes. Her paintings express this negativity through a remarkable refusal to fix and stabilize the structures she builds. For this reason, what her canvases show is more like a precipitation, an abrupt cut-off, than an outcome or a resolved conclusion to her operations. The incongruity of disjointed procedures, which go in different and sometimes divergent directions on the same plane, favors this inconclusive character, of things that don’t fit together. And they really don’t. This does not mean, however, that the works appear incomplete or interrupted. The works are complete, loaded, dense. They result in surfaces filled with overlapping and more overlapping matter and activity. 

Another apparent paradox has to do precisely with the fact that paintings so impregnated with substance and action are populated by discarnate, mutilated bodies, by objects in dismantling, stuffed into uncertain spaces, surrounded by fluorescent lights, clouds of smoke and gas – which, judging by their brightness and colors, are radioactive. Now, if the works still inspire unfinishedness, it’s because, once finished, they are still as if they were open-ended, with their events in continuous march, of formation, distortion, crumbling and construction, again, of their parts, in a different way each time, with each examination – especially in the canvases that the artist painted since 2012.

The artist’s current exhibition consists of a selection of works covering this period. Balanço brings together, at the Iberê Foundation, around 20 works produced over the last 15 years, after Maas’ first experiments with depicting urban scenes, between 2005 and 2009. From then on, the artist resolutely took on the space of painting as a place of tension, where problematic, lively and vibrant units are formed. The work becomes a priority in relation to the result of the work. The clash with the instruments, the techniques, the operations and movements of the body during the making, the accidents and the pictorial languages take precedence over the eventual success. And during the making of each painting, opposing thoughts come into dispute, gestures that are both large and small, both light and slow, both dirty and meticulous, different materials come into play (oil paint, oily stick, spray), in the obsessive activity of placing, spreading, scraping and removing paint, of painting, erasing, getting dirty and painting again, of moving and moving, again and again, here and there, back and forth.

Amidst an ethereal veil of dreamlike colors, you can see a lit cigarette between what may be the outline of the fingers of something that isn’t really a hand, but is close to a volume that may be a head (in Arraia, 2018). Or, in the silhouette of a flattened human body, made up of stains and no flesh, you can see toenails painted a fanciful red (in Popcorn, 2024). These are two indicators that extremes matter here. But in other works, there are also graphic markings, doodles, scribbles, hatches, made with both oily stick and spray paint, which float over the insinuation of representations that are themselves decomposed, in an uninterrupted dynamic of integration and disintegration. What’s more, although recognizing or not recognizing figures is part of the game in the viewer’s relationship with the works, this is by no means what defines them – they are not classifications such as figuration and abstractionism, expressiveness or control, good or bad painting. Rather, it is interesting to note how the dubitative quality of this production ends up manifesting itself with vigor and insolence in the results. It is driven by uncertainties that are closer to perplexity than to hesitation.

The emphasis on elaboration processes becomes evident in the progress of Luciana Maas’s work as the artist reiterates her choice to paint only sneakers – or from the “motif” of sneakers – for consecutive years, from 2010 to 2015. Without worrying about what to paint, but how. After that, shoes continued to appear in the work, but interspersed with other ideas. It should be noted that sneakers became the pretext for the artist to practice and exercise painting for a long time. And what made each of her works unique was the way they were made and appeared. In practice, the work consisted of giving shape to the sneakers, at the same time as she beat them, with varying impetus, sometimes with a violence that would tear them apart, sometimes with the warmth of someone who takes or shapes their objects with their hands.

In these works, the shoes are almost always seen from top to bottom, mostly unclothed, loose on the plane, with a single foot of a pair in the picture. The color palette is also restricted, reduced to black, white and yellow, with occasional insertions of reds, greens and blues. But in contrast to these narrowings, there are many solutions. There are graphic works, with light strokes, decided by observing the object and produced with black paint, which draw the sneakers; there are others with a lot of material, applied in energetic brushstrokes, which drag a thick paint across the surface, like mud, and cross each other, on the edge of the shapeless (Tênis Respingo, 2012); there are canvases in which you can barely make out the shoes or any figure (Tênis Batom, 2012); just as there are silent, lowered paintings in which the shoes, seen from above, rest almost in the center of the painting, slightly to the left, while their boundaries fall apart and blur, almost under smoke, with the surroundings, in a greyish image, with a little yellow on the sides of the objects (Tênis Ela, 2010).

Anyway, the choice of sneakers as “the” theme of her painting indicates Maas’s search for a “low”, dirty, even vulgar materiality. Perhaps the suggestion of a walking painting confirms the importance for the artist of openly exposing her materials, procedures and, in short, the course of her work to the observer. Symbolically, the shoes would accumulate, in their own physical constitution, the marks of the path walked. More than that: the shoes would not only collect the marks of the paths traveled, but would also reflect the effects of that path on the body and soul of those who wore them. The more worn and worn out they were, the greater the difficulties they faced. place around one of the pairs of boots that Vincent Van Gogh painted in 1886, based on texts by Martin Heidegger, Meyer Schapiro and others. In Luciana Maas’s work, although the recurrence of the subject is not so much for representation as for analysis and transfiguration, the repetition seems to say something about time, about the possibilities of variation and about the insistent attempts to catch something that, regardless of the points reached, will always slip through the fingers – due to its ineffable quality.

From 2017 onwards, Luciana Maas began producing paintings without any previous theme or reference. Those works began with her hands in direct contact with the oil paint, spreading it over the surface, just “to get the canvas dirty”, as she describes it. In addition, the size of the supports further expands the scale of her works, which had always been large. Thus, works that often measure 130 x 190 cm jump to 210 x 270 cm, for example. Her attack on the canvas and the paint also explodes, taking on all directions and spilling into a swampy, dark depth, from which dashed lines stand out across the expanse of the plane, straight, zigzagging or as scribbles.

Even though black prevails in these works, retrospectively, the insertion of other colors, such as reds and greens, always in an unrestrained way, without apparent restrictions or limitations, is striking. It was also at this point in her career that Luciana Maas began to add spray paint to her paintings. At first, the spray contrasts with the oil paint due to the flat lines of color that extend, in the foreground, over the dark, viscous mixture that covers the canvas. At the same time, these squiggles have an indeterminacy on the sides, due to the spreading and spraying of the paint, which interrupts and cuts through the pictorial mass, by means of a very artificial, expansive, electric luminescence, in an effect contrary to that intended for its professional use, intended for uniform and smooth finishes. In these paintings, the spray ignites and interrupts other flows. The resourcefulness and freedom that the artist’s production acquires from then on is also remarkable. Two works in this exhibition demonstrate this: Cachoeira Preta (2017) and Bisonte (2018), whose titles come from elements that the artist claims to glimpse in the results, although there is no rest for the eye in those unstable connections.

When she held the Palafitas exhibition in 2022, Maas presented a significant group of paintings in which, for the first time in her career, the silhouette or outline of human figures organized the experience of vision. They are figures that take up the center of the painting, from top to bottom, in sometimes erotic positions and mostly with amputated limbs. They are stumpy, mutilated physical structures that radiate electricity. They inspire violence and energy, just like the painting itself. In some of these works, the characters’ bodies are just that, only color and light. Whether severed or not, they are chromatically homogeneous. And in these works there is a marked distinction, with high color contrast, between figure and background (for example, in Pão, from 2021, as well as in Sob Fios and Correntes de Luz, both from 2020).

In other works from that exhibition, the figures insinuate themselves into the fragments, shredded amid a fog of colored gases. They are beings that are torn, shredded, pierced or that allow themselves to be contaminated by space, until there is no distinction between body and surroundings, in a kind of limitless continuity. The work that gave that show its title, Palafitas, on display here at the Iberê Foundation, produces a strong and emblematic image of this ghostly aspect that Luciana Maas’s work has continued to present ever since. In that painting, four of those bodies – or visions – stand on stilts. With the exception of the volume on the left, made with white paint and partially painted with green and, in part of the outline, red, the others are “licked”, or swallowed, by the same viscous matter as the background. There is no hint of fire in the image, and yet these characters seem absorbed by dark flames, perhaps from a hot night burning their skin. Nor does the painting inspire anything religious; and yet there is something evocative of Christ’s Golgotha. A monstrous scene, with obvious pain, but without sentimental affectations.

The acidic and haunting aspects that the Luciana’s paintings acquired in 2020 – with fluorescent colors, high stridency, sour and corrosive even to the eyes – have intensified in recent works. The chromatic passages are more direct, with drawings and colors that are autonomous in relation to each other and without either of them assuming the commitment to close off beings, objects or space, contributing to the insinuation of a kind of psychological scene. Thus, in the bodies, or fragments of human bodies, there is no longer even the chromatic unity of those previous characters. They are discarnate, invertebrate, fragmentary…

In fact, in some of these paintings that Maas has produced over the last two years, there is a fury that has never been seen before. An anger that announces itself, in the works, in areas marked by broad, quick and, in appearance, angry strokes; by brushstrokes and scrapes, by the use of the back of the brush to produce grooves, by attitudes of someone who might try to open cracks in that surface, to tear it apart, to inspect what would be inside or what else might come out of it. In these works, the artist reiterates her disobedience to the harmonious proportions of anatomy. This is also why these bodies look like plasmas, like the vision of spectres, expanding or shrinking, without defined contours.

In the wake of these cutting gestures, groups of lines fall from the top of recent paintings, either hanging down or supporting swings on which human figures sit. These elements – shapeless, visually unstable – appear in frames that cinema has come to call American. The disposition of their bodies – which, once again, occupy the picture from top to bottom – refers to a particular lineage of paintings with seated characters; a lineage that goes back to Diego Velázquez (in particular, the Portrait of Innocent X, c. 1650); passes through Goya. 1650); it goes through Goya, not least because of those dark backgrounds that don’t delimit an environment, if not an atmosphere; it goes through the static and imagistically restless figures of Alberto Giacometti’s Francis Bacon, who, in 1953, produced his Study for a portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez; and arrives at part of the final work of Iberê Camargo, who named his disembodied and asexual creatures in paintings (such as As Idiotas and Tudo Te é Falso e Inútil), made between 1991 and 1993, “idiots”.

In turn, From this light grouping of such diverse works and artists, there’s a release, , ideas of detachment, of gloomy atmospheres, gestures of tearing apart, the suggestion of feelings of pain and disappearance… In short, a state of affairs that has a connection with what informs Luciana Maas’ work. Alongside this tragic, sinister nature, the artist’s production also shares with pictorial works by Giacometti and Iberê a frenetic commitment to action. And, without a doubt, these are among the characteristics that distinguish Maas’s work in the recent art scene: action painting, characterized by its ongoing self-affirmation, and the interest in tilting scenes, between torpor and the imminence of a disaster.

It is more common today to come across works that deal with painting in a supposedly light and uncompromising way. In order to establish a kind of zero degree of language, or to set up comic, ironic or even cynical approaches to the problems of the image in contemporary life – among them, its fleetingness; as if these alternatives served as an antidote to the weight and rancidity of pictorial traditions, which are often remembered, satirized and circumvented at the same time. Hence the illustrated appearance, in a mixture of grace and freshness, as if they didn’t adhere to any ideological position, which many of them do.

As for Luciana Maas’s painting, it evokes the conditions of human existence without severity or grandiloquence. Without doing so in order to affirm a subjectivity that would be considered privileged, of a heroic, spontaneous expressiveness or, on the contrary, one crossed only by anguish; but in the critical inspection of its possibilities of acting in the present. The artist’s work is mundane and meditative about the pleasures, horrors and finitude of life. In this sense, she seems to be confronting what has been worn out as the material of contemporary art, in order to carry out a work that is averse to fixation and stability. In order to remain tentative, in both suspension and balance.

José Augusto Ribeiro

José Augusto Pereira Ribeiro holds a master’s degree and a PhD in Art Theory, History and Criticism from the School of Communications and Arts at the University of São Paulo. He worked as senior curator at Pinacoteca de São Paulo from 2012 to 2022 and director of the visual arts center at Centro Cultural São Paulo between 2010 and 2012.