It’s a vision of the everyday – strikingly ordinary, yet subtly unsettled by a hint of strangeness, as if the whole scene could suddenly tip into the realm of nightmares. A still life with a revolver, a pair of gloves and a rose, planted on a table. The composition of one of Paula Siebra’s first works for the exhibition seems straight out of an Agatha Christie novel. For the artist, detective fiction is a metaphor for painting. Not so much in the unravelling of the plot, but in the pleasure we take circling around it, like a bloodhound around its prey, tracing the contours of each character, deciphering their gestures, mapping the world they inhabit. There’s something magical in this kind of investigation, a process that crystallizes through intuition, often beyond the reach of language. Much like the challenge of putting a painting into words. 

Paula Siebra is from Fortaleza, in the state of Ceara in northern Brazil. It’s where she grew up. She says she started drawing early on and trained her eye not in a fine arts museum but by visiting the folk arts museum in Dragão do Mar with her mom every Sunday. She remembers almost as vividly the melancholic strains of choro, this traditional music played within her family. For a moment, she nearly chose music over art. But images pulled her back in, and she enrolled in a painting course at the University of Rio de Janeiro. The first shapes that left an impression on her were ceramics, laces, and embroideries from her home region as well as simple images of ex-votos. In the first art books she got her hands on, she encountered Frida Kahlo and Balthus.  

Of course, the exhibition also owes its title to Freud and his concept of the uncanny – or, as per François Roustang’s translation, the strangely familiar (l’étrange familier)– that which feels close yet remains hidden. Take, for instance, this mask left on a dresser, with a drawer half-open overflowing with letters and a carafe resting on a tablecloth creased in a peculiar way. Its presence is like a trace of a carnival past inadvertently forgotten – an objective encounter worthy of André Breton. This fascination with the everyday, paired with an attraction to a kind of magical realism, also emanates from her mother’s sewing box – an orange pincushion, a measuring tape loosely coiled – or in the careful arrangement of a well-packed suitcase. Not as a metaphor but simply as a display of the quiet diligence involved in folding striped shirts, tucking away a pair of pliers, a hairbrush, a book, and a pair of shoes inside an old crocodile-skin suitcase found at a flea market. Inside the suitcase, there’s a novel by a writer from her home region, its cover adorned with a woodcut print. She chose it because the image recalls the vernacular techniques she feels closest to. And the dominos? It’s always good to have a set on hand when you’re travelling: It’s an easy way to make friends.

A series of landscapes accompany these scenes, like backdrops for narratives without a script. One must surrender to the quiet pleasure of this restrained painting. On the velvety petals of a plant, glistening beads of water evoke the morning dew. How does one paint dew? Paula Siebra wonders. Through atmosphere. Typically, her assistants prepare her canvases using local materials. She then primes them with an ochre or gray base, depending on the tonal range she aims to achieve. From there, she builds the image with countless layers of tiny, precise brushstrokes, using an almost dry paint. Her palettes tend to be homogenous. Though her brushwork is delicate, it accumulates in numerous layers to create a soft glow – like in the Venetian paintings she likes so much. 

Her most enigmatic works are her figures – sometimes cropped, reduced to fragments, like ancient bas-reliefs. In fact, their skin often takes on the colour of stone. Paula Siebra draws inspiration from the Brazilian artist Vicente do Rego Monteiro (1889 – 1970) and the Italian painter Antonio Donghi (1897 – 1963), both of whom flirted with elements of naïve art. She studied Magritte’s paintings, particularly L’éternellement évident (1948) at MoMA, which left a deep impression on her. Domenico Gnoli features among her artistic heroes, a connection that becomes evident in her depictions of figures seen from the front or back, frozen in an embrace, or absorbed in meticulous activities – like examining the pearls of a necklace through a magnifying glass. Their hair is combed with deliberate precision, turned into abstract surfaces that resemble rivers or furrowed landscapes. They echo the same quiet obsessions that haunt her perfectly arranged suitcase – the pursuit of harmony.

Mendes Wood DM presents As primeiras coisas [The earliest things], a painting exhibition by Paula Siebra. Siebra carves out primordial imagery from ubiquitous objects, signs, and emotions that invite the observer to immerse themselves in memorial contexts and lyrical reverberations. From an initial laconicism — reflected in the conciseness of the titles and the seeming synthesis of elements in the paintings — and with a devastating directness, each image is incisively delivered like dense crystals that may take ages to dissolve, memories in their quintessential stage. Siebra’s paintings reflect on collective memories, social relations, subjectivities, and human desires, embalmed by a metaphysical and nostalgic atmosphere.

Identifying the most primordial things in image and life, Siebra draws a cartography of returns: painting the places she has visited, whether through circumstance or memory, and anchors herself while facing the unceremonious accumulation of life’s abrupt movements. The freshly laundered clothes that return to the bed, the pens that neatly revisit the shirt pocket, the imprisoned feelings that are sealed in an envelope and freed into the world. Although allegorically presented in isolated scenes, the paintings engender an interconnected macrocosm through affective and semiological mechanisms. Similarly, while the works bear the inescapable personal perception of the artist, they are reflected in the desired postulation of a collective representational will, where the universal and the particular amalgamate.

Siebra’s remarkable semantic assertiveness is not limited to formal representation; it extends to capturing the poetic essence of the subject’s encounters with these objects, which, in a sense, also transform into subjects themselves. In their daily repetition, these intimate living objects prove valuable by remaining constant and emphasized over a dilated time arc. Although some inevitably have their origins linked to a factory seriality, Siebra proposes an individualization of objects that radiate their subjectivities because they belong to someone special, holding non-transferable stories and bearing witness to a life thirsty for yeses. (“All the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes.”[1] )

This undeniable, raw, and bare realism in Siebra’s work fuels an inexhaustible imaginative power, continuously attracting layers of meaning and depth to her poetic expression. Furthermore, it is crucial to remember that an object’s idealization and narrative fabulation do not annul its underlying reality. In O Piano, Siebra’s archetypal search is so impetuous that it produces an instrument with one hundred keys, perhaps more absolute and memorable than the usual one with eighty-eight. The surplus dozen stands as a firm and deep voice that attests to the truth of the picture. The octaves are extended and the images of fascination are prolonged, just like the wavy golden hair that spreads beyond the limits of the double bed in Cochilo, drawing a dreamlike topology close to Dunas.

In this reservoir of substance — and in whatever order this essence is constituted —, Siebra lists and produces these scenes driven by a feeling of zeal: not only in physical care, such as in the meticulous organization of the suitcase and the polishing of the low-heeled shoes, but in the esteem of indelible memories. It is as if the artist is constantly collecting something in the midst of a lost and careless world, “promising it a life of warmth and security.”[2]  This heed is conveyed in investigating the best position and light that a given object can have in a composition, a ballast provided by the painter’s extreme erudition in the history of painting and the tradition of still life. Moreover, Siebra ties personal connections while revisiting her favorite painters, as if carefully organizing a toolbox of affectivities: the primordial image and the force of the almost banal life of Antonio Donghi, the mnemonic centrality of Domenico Gnoli, the subtle tones and cooked light of Albert York, the careful placement and spatial coexistence of Giorgio Morandi.

In disagreement with what an obsolete image theory defended – that a given artist was passively influenced by other preceding artists –, Siebra attests to an active influence: she “makes an intentional selection from an array of resources in the history of her craft”[3]. This active action also opposes the artificial power of art history and of crafting an organization of things, making her painting proudly manifest traces of the experience of the place where she was born, Fortaleza, Brazil, but which expands through a profound erudition to constellational visualities, merging very different geographical and historical contexts. In this tone, Siebra impregnates fiction with so much reality and the lived experience with so much fable that this threshold fades and is rebuilt, like shifting sand castles.

With ambiguous inexhaustibility and iconological possibilities, the painter presents particular objects drenched in poetic suggestion. An apple, for instance: the care taken in polishing the skin wrapped in a handkerchief, its presence in the fruit bowl on the set table, the grateful pride placed on the teacher’s desk, its erotic silhouette, the synthesis of original sin, the first desire. There is, therefore, no attempt to establish a Platonic idea of things but rather an endeavor to access the very core of the painter’s imagination. These crystalline images, pure to the same extent that they are fragile, show Siebra’s intertwining of psychoanalysis and the construction of imagetic archetypes that flirt with their unconscious potencies.

Siebra’s paintings recall the arduous and brave exercise of recalling distant memories embedded in the unconscious: one imagines remembering with such force, with eyes closed and pressed tightly, holding the breath, as if giving birth to an image that comes into the world in sparks through one’s ears. Her images are subtly manifested in their unmediated renditions. Sitting at the table carefully set only for herself, opening a sketchbook to work, and placing a flower in her lapel announces a daily determination to face the world, the strength to deal with life’s overwhelming beauty and pain in an unassuming act as if to say: “World, I am here to suffer for you. To die of love for every single thing. I am here, lone, ready. It is on me.”
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[1] Clarice Lispector, The hour of the star. New York: New Directions Books, 2011 (originally published in Portuguese in 1977), translated by Ben Moser, p. 14.

[2] Virginia Woolf, “Solid objects” (1920) in Virginia Woolf, A Haunted House: The Complete Shorter Fiction (ed. Susan Dick). London: Vintage, 2003, p. 98.

[3] Michael Baxandall, Patterns of intention: on the historical explanation of pictures. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1985, p. 59. The original quote ends with “his craft,” here changed to “her craft” to meet Siebra’s practice.

Carolina Vieira, 2022

        According to the studies of Lu Jong, a form of Tibetan Yoga, earth is one of the five elements wrought inside and outside the body and its pure quality is calmness. Associated with the earth element, calmness goes against much of what we undergo nowadays and, at the same time, it is necessary as a haven to breathe, pause and ponder. This is the work of Paula Siebra, revealing an attentive gesture and an invitation to contemplate what surrounds us.

        The present time proposes us this: breathing, pausing, amorousness. Paula's painting requires attention, and in exchange it allows us to perceive the welcoming and caring that the contemplation of her work provokes. The elements contained in her works frequently bring, rising from mundane life, a sense of belonging and intimacy, which is "nothing but feeling at home", as the artist herself said in an exchange of letters. Which memory causes you to feel at home? What place would that be?

        With a keen eye on her surroundings, Siebra was drawn to the sand bottles. These objects, as handicrafts, became something usual: perhaps due to mass production and tourist trading, the technique of sandcrafted bottles or sand bottle art has become extremely ordinary. A work that demands patience and imagination is not solely a trivial object of the culture of the coast of Ceará — a souvenir, a little key chain, a gift from Ceará.

        There is something in this object that captures Paula's attention: the construction of the landscape, the relationship with the colors of her favorite painters, the composition as a possibility of figurative or abstract image. The artist realized the richness of creation in the craft of composing images with colored sand in glass bottles — a delicate, sensitive and precious work. In addition, when deepening her research, she still came across the fact that, in Ceará, the history of the founding myth of the practice bears the name of a woman, Joana Carneiro Maia (1908-1978), who developed it and transmitted it to other people in the municipality of Majorlândia.

        There are several names for the particular technique that is exalted here through the eyes of Paula Siebra, inviting the public to perceive with a novel glance what is routine and is also beyond the visible — like as a sunset landscape on the beach, rafts on the sea, rugged cliffs or a simple dune on the coast.

After Lunch,

Bruno Brito, 2022

“The ideal would be to make of every object a center of the universe.” – Ortega y Gasset

Chapels, vases, cups, flowers, house facades, common places and everyday compositions on a tablecloth. These are some of the elements that make up the visual vocabulary of Paula Siebra, born in Ceará (a state in the Brazilian northeast). Her work sheds light on a Brazilian daily life that is both silent and subtle, different from that other commercial, easily placed in the drawer of "Brazilianness" with a profusion of saturated colors, sounds, textures, and excesses in general.

Paula opts for a palette of faded colors that already appear to have been born antique. Shifting colors that, paradoxically, were tempered by a young painter these days. Shifting because they seem to change like the sandy landscapes of northeastern Brazil, an environment familiar to the artist: a yellow that greens/(tends?) to green, a blue that tends to brown, a white that tends to gray. Sands that also result in the traditional little bottles crafted using with colored sand by artisans in Ceará and its surroundings, decorated with regional signs that also bloom in the artist's work.

If Paula decided to become a sandcrafting artisan, she would probably choose to fill hourglasses in place of bottles. Hourglasses for us to ponder on the brevity of images and our most subtle memories. It would be enough to rotate the object for the image to dissolve before our eyes, resulting in a large stain of some as yet unnamed color. While the artist employs the language of painting, Paula presents us with images that appear to be slowly disappearing, or, from a more optimistic angle, emerging again in the field of the canvas, like a cyanotype being revealed with sunlight.

Curiously, we are left orphaned in front of the paintings, and we don't know at what moment the image in question is found. We did not identify how much was painted, when it was rediscovered or how long it will last on flat support. For an unsuspecting observer like me at first contact with the work, her paintings look like an artist from the past, perhaps a modernist or an anonymous person from the first half of the 20th century in Brazil. Not only because of the age the painting appears to be, but because of the way the image was conceived and presented. This leads us to believe that there appears to be a thought that hovers in the imagination of some painters over the years and Paula is among them: Alfredo Volpi, José Pancetti, Lore Koch, Lorenzato, Rebolo, Júlio Martins da Silva, Portinari, Tarsila, Piero della Francesca and many others, such as Valloton, which the artist likes and recognizes in the unpretentious little bottles from Ceará.

It seems fair to say that Paula's works are endowed with a disconcerting timelessness and that they could have been made 100 years ago, yesterday, today or even tomorrow, due to their freshness. Looking at this set of images gives us the feeling that we are borrowing the memory of someone we don't even know, with scenes we haven't experienced and even miss something we never had. This intimacy, sensitively portrayed by Paula, makes us access a memory that is timeless, diffuse, and ethereal.

Despite the luminosity in her paintings pointing to a certain orange heat, like those late afternoons in De Chirico, Paula's paintings seem to record a non-chronological hour, or rather, an "in-between hour". Time when goats disappear in sertanejo mysticism, as described by Câmara Cascudo. The time between one chime and another of the church bell. The hour that precedes the rosary and the litany. The artist never depicts the full hour, protagonist of the analogue clock and appointments noted on the wall calendar. On the contrary, Paula seems to seek a certain anonymity from time and, why not, from space. By representing these elements of popular daily life, the artist precisely fills in the gaps of this domestic and community life, common to many of us.

Her paintings, drawings, and engravings resemble photographs taken by a hidden narrator who arrived late to record the main scene, leaving only the residual part of the event. This narrator was left with only the apple given up in half, the bread crumb on the table, the cold coffee in the bottle and the beloved who, after waiting so long, fell asleep.

Would these be the images that permeate our unconscious between one dream and another? In the interim of the heroic, frightening or surreal narratives - the ones we remember when we wake up - would there be these ordinary stretches of life that we don't notice when we are awake? The unimportant clothesline between a tree and a two-story building seems to surface here in Paula's memory, in her painting and in us, the observers. As in Clarice Lispector's short story, where a blind man chewing gum at the bus stop destabilizes the protagonist, the scenes painted by Paula seem to move us into these crevices of memory, unimportant for the official life of full hours, noted and fulfilled. It's as if these discreet, silent objects and characters - clamor for our attention momentarily, not loudly or effusive, but through its own self-contained meanings, now emerging on the surface of the canvas. They are elements impregnated from the surrounding events that, when organized by the artist, are presented to us in a humble and hieratic way.