|
Paris, November (via VARIG)
On the 20th many artists, both French (Lacasse,
Leon Zak, etc.) and Brazilian (Rossini Perez, Shiro, Piza,
Frans Krajberg, Sérgio Telles, among others), met at the
Jacques Massol Gallery – together with “tous brésiliens de
Paris” – to see the exhibition of Noêmia Guerra’s recent
paintings and celebrate the professional effort and the
sympathique vivacity of this well-known artist. It was a
happy meeting, lasting almost three hours. The new landscapes,
sketched in Bahia but painted here, created a feeling of
balance and tranquility in their large horizontal lines and
their austere tones, so well resolved, with bounty and
harmony.
In Brook Street in the English capital – in the very center of
galleries, near the Old and New Bond Streets – the Alwin
Gallery had inaugurated, on the 5th, an even larger
exhibition of Noêmia’s works, an exhibition that remains open,
coinciding – in a rare record – with the opening of the Paris
exhibition of paintings of the same period. There, like in
Paris, the artist adventured simultaneously into two types of
figurative realization: the beaches of Itapoã, Amaralina,
Lagoa do Abaeté, in broad solutions, with substantial efforts
and wide, colorful horizons, in a light ocher harmonizing with
very personal greens; and – on the other hand – the effort to
interpret the rhythms of human figures (and sometimes, with
lower intensity, also coconut trees, in certain pictures), in
the candomblé religious rites, in the street markets
and at work. Here the artist maintains the chromatic
trepidation, the vibration of light/color, which has been her
characteristic up to now.
At the Massol gallery is the great panel, divided into five
sections, of the candomblé dance and of macumba
– well resolved in terms of color, in dense, sensitive,
velvety tones. There is also the painting “Pelourinho
Landscape”, seen through a window. Always the purple and green
tones that fascinate the artist and have composed her personal
color scheme up to now. She co-exists with the chromatic and
compositional serenity of her great landscapes, where the
artist has reached the climax of her pictorial work up to now
– to my own taste – without diminishing her other conceptions.
It is on the beaches that Noêmia Guerra creates a modern
landscape of Brazil, after Pancetti’s. The brilliant
atmosphere referred to by the English critic George S. Whittet
and the Brazil feeling that exists in her artistic work, as
emphasized by Massol in his forward, all this and other things
converge towards the maturity of Noêmia’s modern landscape
work, which an abstraction pioneer like Lacasse defined as “a
significant step forward” by the artist.
|
|
From German and Dutch exhibitions to
news from Europe
Mário Barata - Jornal do Commercio |
| |
|
From Europe comes news of the success of Brazilian
artists’ exhibitions, among them those of Noêmia Guerra in
London and Rubem Valentim in Rome.
The former’s exhibition was in May at St. Martin’s
Gallery, and it caused significant repercussions. In his
London Commentary, G. S. Whittet, the art critic and
director of Studio International, gave his opinion
on the work of the artist in this important English
magazine, declaring that this “Brazilian artist, who works
in Paris, has greater talent than many of those included
in the recent Brazilian exhibition at the Royal College of
Art. Her abstractions in tones of blue, red and green,
applied as in a bird’s plumage, suggest the pure
atmosphere of space in subjective associations of colors
that are in emotional movement, reflecting themselves” (p.
227 of last May’s Studio International).
The beautiful reproductions in the catalogue confirmed the
progress of the well-known artist, in adjusting the tones
within the vibrant and exuberant chromatic effect that is
so much her own. Now, let us wait for an exhibition of
Noêmia’s work in a gallery or museum in Rio.
In the ARTS REVIEW (issue of May 29 to June 12,
1965), on the same page on which Guy Burn comments on the
joint exhibition of works by Du-buffet, Matta, Michaux and
Roquichot, there appears Cottie Burland’s assessment of
Noêmia’s art, which is very meaningful. Among other things
she says that “not only color but an informal movement
determines her style. This outstanding artist is better in
her larger, vertical works, but in every work she obtains
a strong sense of reciprocal movement”... “and she has the
skill of suggesting a movement that is conveyed from the
canvas to the beholder”. It seems to us that for C.B. it
was above all the ability to capture and express movement
that surprised her in Noêmia Guerra’s work, together with
the varied and luminous use of colors”. |
|
