TERESA VIANA - drawings

Nancy Betts

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Original Portuguese text published in the catalog of the exhibition held at Escritório de Arte Rosa Barbosa – SP - 1999 

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Paper, white and empty, conjures up and instigates action. How can any artist resist the temptation to breathe form and motion into this field so amenable to possibilities – possibilities that lead gestures to overcome inertia and to slip and slide over the paper’s surface to render lines, drawings.

The artist initiates creation with this seminal gesture and goes on to build up a text. Each line has its course that joins with others, and by means of accumulation, densifies the compositional whole. The layers of color, usually monochrome, may lie over or under the drawing. The lines, softened by brushstrokes, convey na impression that the composition has sunken into a deeper region of the paper. The distribuition of compositional elements triggers a dynamics that leads viewers’ to focus on areas of condensed information built on the plane, and at the same time to seemingly  ‘enter ‘ the drawing. Space is filed to the point of exhaustion; in other words, to that point where ‘appearing to be’ becomes ‘being’.

This expressiveness results in two contrasting states: works that feature a high content of line concentration with linked rhythm produce inhospitable, barren, arid landscapes  woven with dry and stiff lines on the whim of na overwhelming impetus, and unleash a strange isolationist effect; and works that feature interrupted and less condensed lines that seem to float like fragments set loose in yhe topology of the field and create a feeling of landscapes which, although inaccessible, are quiet and peaceful.

These drawings, shown together in this exhibition, from a unit whose totality attests to the consistency of the discourse, and reasserts the inflections that closely link and interrelate the individual drawings in the proposed imagery construct.

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