“O ar que eu não seguro”
[“The Air I Can’t Hold”]
Julia Pereira
Exhibition period: from 02/05 to 02/25/2022
The act of painting is intimate, the gesture is an indication of existence and it is through this that the psychic correspondence between the artist and the work materializes. The connection between mind, body and brush is direct and constant. The integration between being and doing results in a Form that has a kind of existence of its own, that exudes a vital quality.
The strength to paint comes from the desire for ink and the root of painting is autobiographical memory. The process takes place through a strong connection between the memory of something experienced, agreed with bodily and psychic reactions about it. The image already lives inside me and it is during this time of elaboration that I try to translate the sensation that crosses and comes out of me. The beginning is calm, slow and gradually gains agility, short breath and racing heart. I notice the gap between the palette and the canvas and the clash with the work becomes intense, sometimes aggressive. Paint and gestures are added or taken away: sometimes I attack the painting with force as if, naively, it would lead to some constructive result. I reach a climax and soon there is a feeling of exhaustion and cooling. At this point, I feel an energy drain. A kind of emptiness that over time has resulted in a breath and a more open field, in which unfinished lines try to suspend time. My inability to capture something that always escapes makes me return to the canvas and thus the pictorial dialogue begins.
