Galeria Fortes Vilaça is pleased to present new works by Leda Catunda in Galeria 2. After showing large-scale works in her defense of her doctoral dissertation last year at the Centro Universitário Maria Antônia, the São Paulo artist returns to the gallery with a body of work also developed on a large scale, but this time on paper.

The exhibition includes six smaller works, but the focus is on her gigantic, intricate collages, the results of daring experiments with the medium of paper. Superpositions, intertwinings, juxtapositions, and transparencies are some of the procedures created to organize images within these collages. Since the first "soft paintings" developed by Catunda more than 15 years ago, these are recurring themes in work of the artist, who has always emphasized an accumulative process in the construction of her art.

In these collages the artist is working with two orders of imagery, the first being that which contains the principal form, a drawing inspired by modernist lines of abstraction, where planes intersect, forming an amoeba-like shape. The second order is that of the contained images, which fill the field and the surfaces, varying between more figurative scenes and textures that originate in appropriations of already existing images on patterned paper or fabric. Some patterns, such as the image of brains, were created from original designs printed on voile.

The everyday visuality contained in the appropriated images bring up subjects that involve the question of taste, challenging standards and aesthetic notions. At the same time, these works allude to a comfortable universe that the artist tries to create. The comfort is proposed by the rounded forms, by the softness that is sometimes real, found in velvet or in foam stuffing, and sometimes metaphorical, in the use of photographs of pleasant landscapes, created by the artist herself and printed on voile or paper. The collages incorporate dense narratives that abound in details that blossom with every new look.