Fortes Vilaça is pleased to announce Janaina Tschäpe’s third solo show, this time, in the Galpão. Tschäpe is bringing to Brazil highlights from her most recent production, including paintings, watercolors, drawings, photographs from her Botanica series, and a video from her Eclipse series, all shown here for the first time.
On her huge canvas Wilt – six meters long by three meters high – and in her large watercolors, Tschäpe flirts with abstraction and landscape. The forms, full of folds and concavities, expand in organic lines, revealing a precise balance between gestuality and detail. The artist creates moist environments resembling rainy places, like “forest fog.” Using a palette of purple, green, pink and blue hues, her artwork seem to be scenes of the same place, at different phases of the day.
All the artworks in the show deal with the theme of landscape: in a more distanced way in the paintings and watercolors, and in a more intimist manner – with small “close-ups” – in the drawings and photographs. The colored-pencil drawings are made with light lines and beckon the viewer to come closer, in order to appreciate their minimal details and delicate chromatic relations.
Tschäpe points out that “in painting we have the freedom to prolong the forms to where we desire; with photography I have tried to repeat this experience.” In the photographs of the Botanica series, the artist uses real, natural scenes to which she adds invented details: a flower inspired in real plant species, but made of colored modeling compound and plastic. With vibrant colors, these small deceptions resemble true fruits and vegetables, but give provoke feelings of strangeness and curiosity, since at first sight it is not obvious what is real and what is invented in the landscape.
Until 12 June, a retrospective of Tschäpe’s work – centered more on photographs and videos – can be seen at Galeria de Arte Laura Alvin in Rio de Janeiro. Still in 2009, the artist will be participating at the Triennial of the International Center of Photography, New York, and will hold a solo show at Kasama Nichido Art Museum, in Japan. The 2008, the artist had a large solo show at IMMA – Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin.
