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Paris – Via VARIG – Noêmia Guerra is a Brazilian painter
who has been working for 7 years in Paris, where she is
currently exhibiting her paintings for the first time.
Having given up a whole life that was built along
different lines in order to dedicate herself exclusively
to painting, she has worked almost anonymously all this
time. Her first exhibition was inaugurated last week, at
the Jacques Massol Gallery.
The artist has not made any kind of concession in order to
achieve what she has achieved. She painted until the day
when, by force of circumstance, her art called the
attention of experts. It was they who sought her out in
her Montparnasse atelier. The twenty-two paintings in the
exhibition – representing Brazilian landscapes or
sketching typical figures from the different regions of
our country – are hanging on the gallery’s walls. The
artist is enormously satisfied and admits it herself.
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Noêmia Guerra’s exhibition is introduced in the catalogue
by G.S. Whittet, an English critic who for twenty years
dedicated himself to paintings for an art publication he
directed. It is he who writes: “If her name means war,
her painting means peace. The peace one achieves when the
conflict between ideas and pigments is reached, and their
application is solved. When I first saw Noêmia’s
paintings, in an apartment close to the sky in the
Montparnasse neighborhood, they shone with a somber beauty
in deep purple, on which banners in the green of spring
and floral reds represented her battle symbols. I saw them
again later in a gallery installed in a London basement,
where their exotic and ardent flavor seemed even richer.
Seeing the paintings, I was able to get to know the
artist. This woman from Rio de Janeiro has a serious
character that comes from a profound experience of life,
with its sufferings and joys, its simplicities and
disappointments”.
Further on, Whittet declares: “To Noêmia Guerra,
painting makes of each canvas a flag, a banner of faith in
devotion to the domain where Piero della Francesca worked,
to which Rembrandt mixed his sweat, and in which Cezanne
experienced his sensations. Such painting has a strength
that is the greatest strength of a woman who, totally
lucidly, followed her vocation. Art is the signature of
personality. As science progresses, art falls back. But
fortunately there are still some artists who trust the
compass of their own magnetism. Noêmia Guerra is one of
them: she does not ask of spectators anything more than
their own eyes. Once conquered, they lead to the country
of light, where nothing is sought and there is no path. We
look and receive. Colored, rich and sonorous surfaces
radiate a luminosity that is Painting”.
“As a poet – he concludes – I think that in her
landscapes of light, so generously given, Noêmia Guerra
embraces life with a courageous happiness that only a few
of us possess. As a critic, I am certain that her message
is readable without any code, that this is a painting that
is simply painting, in its pure state of universal
meaning”. |
