Detour
to the infinity
Who wouldn’t be afraid of black? Who wouldn’t feel, before a black canvas, a slight quiver or a certain suffocation, like a feeling that nothing else will happen? After all, in a culture that gave to light the prestige of revelations and of clairvoyance, how can one see anything but emptiness in black, a profound depth, its own nothing? Where white was full of light and color, black was the complete opposite: absence, mourning, silence.
Evoking the nothing, making the painting return to its own desert was Malevich’s adventure. The black square on a white background announced the radical exile of the definite reality of the every day life: without images or colors, just the level zero of language. It was an awkwardness and a new beginning: a temporary emptiness for the emergency of a pure feeling on which a new world would be built. And if Malevich’s nothing ended promises and utopias, the black paintings of Ad Reinhardt were crisis and merely statements: “the last painting one can paint”.
On Rosa Oliveira’s black and white canvases, on the other hand, there are no nostalgias for the origin or the lost ends. There are no suspension nor threats of dismemberment . Even less are there easiness: they are premeditated tensions, calculated rigidity and geometric exactitude. They need an almost circumspection strange to the universe of contemporary image and its spectacles. It’s almost silence, a whisper, almost sound, almost tone.
The artist seems to have a mission, to redeem black from the ancestors pain, from the submission of the shadows. The black doesn’t differ from the light of its specters, but breaks the blindness of the suns, revealing the possibilities of the crepuscule. There is no compassion in this rescue, no sadness in the absence, but precision and choice: her blacks and whites refuse to be the extreme finalists and the prime of the chromatic gamma and the symbolic cosmogonies . They impregnate the subtle that provoke the in between. They’re uncountable blacks and whites.
Not even the aurora, nor the casualty of color of art or the world, but the interminable of the infamous differentiations, of the small perceptions and initiations.
As it is there, at the unlimited entry of this in between, that the detours find themselves. Detours that aren’t given easily, in hesitant lines, but in the lonely exercise of its construction.
Instead of the absolute, the plurality of picturesque events: the detour to the infinity thru its trials.
Marisa Florido Cesar
May of 2003