2002 - Spirit and Substance |
Catalog Texts
The 5th Element
Teresa Ribeiro's painting offers the observant viewer a constant flow of elements, a perceptive unravel where layers of arrangements reveal themselves in interconnected levels: forming an honest, never ending but always balanced, whole. Shapes, proportions and textures are strictly multifunctional, promoting an interaction between the several layouts of each painting. This applies to the ambiguous fluidity of perspectives, the interconnection of shapes that transform into textures, the arrangements that describe space at the same time they suggest events: integration and mixtures of movements. In this painting there is a constant play of expression where each element can be identified as a unit... but to each unit corresponds a multitude of interpretations. It's not rhetorical painting, nor literary or descriptive. It's reference lives in the fourth most basic elements of the human unconsciousness: Water is in the fluidity of depth tricks, where reflections of surface and shadows get together in a unstable embrace, dragging the eyes that, restlessly, plunge in and come back; Fire lives in the movement of each colour, from light to its extinction, sparkling and then coming back to the beginning in another colour and movements: the colourful sparks dance between the lava shapes till the distant glaciers; Earth appears not only in the directly exposed geological shapes, but also imbuing a sort of ancestral expressionism where the eternal conflict of Life is present: possession, a promise of growth, male and female archetypes struggling for contemplation; Air reveals itself in the urge of flying, the summit views, the presence of horizons and above all, the constant breathing, vital for the balanced harmony of water, fire and earth. Yet, there is a strength, a constant presence through which the painter disturbs, calls or surrounds the viewer in her work: a primal fifth element, purely human, which is the tension created by the presence of the unspeakable - the element shared with us in the paintings - Art. Eli Camargo Jr. Março/02 |
Exhibition Catalog
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