Galeria Fortes Vilaça is pleased to present its second exhibition with the São Paulo artist Erika Verzutti. The show includes paintings on medium density fiberboard (MDF), a bronze sculpture, and several drawings. The title In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower-the second volume of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past¬-has an almost literal relationship with Verzutti's paintings of dresses, but also reveals the artist's interest in the Proustian strategy of creating different visual stimuli without establishing a necessary connection between the images' significations.
In this new series, Verzutti paints with acrylic paint on MDF cut into the shape of dresses. Disparate shapes such as a bouquet of flowers, a seal, a landscape, or a pineapple are organized into each dress's unique silhouette. It is a repertory of everyday images, many of them linked to the ornamental universe or to mass culture, and the artist creates a permanent collision with conventional forms and hierarchies of organization in figuration.
There is no choice of a perspective, but a collage of various perspectives. There is no preference for a specific palette or style, but their accumulation and superposition. Incorporating accidents into the trajectory of the painting, Verzutti transforms dripped paint into a flower, which in turn creates the necessity for a garden, a sky, etc. Many times a "stretched" color appears, expanded from a figure. The bet on a certain disengagement with painting is revealed not only in the absence of hierarchy, but also in an artistic practice that favors the hybrid object: the cut-out form gives the painting the status of an object; it purposefully mixes together art and decoration.
The same principle of "stretching" an image is used in a group of drawings where Verzutti uses watercolors to amplify the original cut-out paper forms with images of candy. The polychrome bronze sculpture Saramandaia shows a tangle of things arranged in a vase as if they were flowers. Each of the shapes-woman, animal, flower, paint, fruit-emerges as if it were created by the vase itself. The repetition of certain elements, whether in drawing, painting, or sculpture, and their constant reprocessing indicates the search for a visual language that feeds itself, creating a personal universe.
