The earliest things
Mateus Nunes, 2024
Mateus Nunes, 2024
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.”
—
—
[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.
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.”
—
—
[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.
Satin Nights: the darkness of memory and painting as relationship
Mariana Leme, 2022
Mariana Leme, 2022
I still keep in me
Satin nights
Ivory moons
Days of full sun
Satin nights
Ivory moons
Days of full sun
It is dusk on the beach. For a few minutes, the sky looks like ember before cooling down into a blueish black. The landscape eases down, keeping the memory of the day’s past, like an incantation. Paula Siebra’s Satin Nights are memories of the heat coming from the sun that has already gone, but that remains under the skin; the memory of Amelinha’s song playing on the radio, whose verses have now become this essay’s epigraph. There is a line under the stars, artificial lights that shine faraway, the twilight, the absence of light. Recently-bathed children, a vase of flowers. The quietness of darkness.
Satin Nights is also the result of the artist’s research on and interest in “silicogravura”, which is the practice of sand bottle art, in which images – mostly landscapes – are created from the juxtaposition of colorful sand placed in translucent bottles. Siebra does not represent these objects; however, she establishes with them a profound dialogue, both in terms of her pictorial approach featuring fast chromatic, perhaps unexpected, transitions, and in terms of a sense of belonging. It is not by chance that the exhibition also presents the work of artists who have kept this ancient technique alive: Dudui (Carlos Eduardo da Rocha) and Edgar Freitas.
The oil and egg tempera works are made with overlayers that produce a dense atmosphere, in which colors impact one another, in the same way that the sea water reflects the light in the sky, wet sand is darker and vegetation creates patches on dunes. “It is evident that colors vary because of light”, stated the Renaissance thinker Leon Battista Alberti, “since every color in shade does not appear as [the same color] placed under the rays of light.” [1] Colors oscillate by nature, as well as light and the tide.
Alberti, whose 15th century treaty is considered the first one to systematize a theory on painting, declares: “As a painter, I have […] this opinion about colors: that through their mixing one generates an almost infinite number of colors; but that among painters there are authentic kinds of colors conforming to the number of the four elements, from which numerous species are obtained. […] There is the color of fire that they call red; then the color of air as well, which is called sky blue or azure; the color of water is green. The earth, instead, has the color of ashes.” [2] This is not trivial. By connecting the colors he sees as “authentic” to the four elements, Alberti is proposing a close relationship between painting and nature, as if they were made of the same matter: a relationship of interdependence.
Perhaps it is possible to say that Siebra’s works also arise from the encounter between artist and place, its colors, the matter from which it is made, the dyed sand placed in the bottles. They are not, therefore, disinterested compositions, but rather a sort of landscape — both natural and human — transfigured into painting, from darkness into a dense matter loaded with affection.
The images are what they appear to be: the sea, the sky, the sand, a vase of flowers, a jewelry box, a woman combing her hair. However, like in the song from which the exhibition borrows its title, the images evoke several other images that inhabit the spectator’s memory, always diverse and uncertain, and dependent on personal experiences.
There is a sense of generosity in Paula Siebra’s work, which is patiently built with small brushstrokes, with the accumulation of pigments: existence is always in relation to something else, in a sort of joint enterprise. For instance, the blue of the sky or sea in Falésias e areia molhada [Cliffs and Wet Sand] is alternated with an orangish tone underneath and around it. The iconographic elements also change meaning when placed side by side. Inside the jewelry box in Coisas da minha mãe [My mother’s things], there is an open lipstick, a glass bottle, and, amongst other objects, a pair of closed eyes. Underneath them, droplet-shaped earrings are turned into tears, echoing the curtain at the entrance of the exhibition room. Pearls are water that is precious — they are also an enigma, a personal story. Nothing exists except as a group. The woman in Mulher penteando o cabelo [Woman Combing her Hair], with her hair free from salt, seems to be recalling recent events, and the shape of her body brings into mind popular sculptures and wooden ex-votos, art objects that are deeply ingrained in the life and body of those who make them.
“Painting certainly has in itself a truly divine power […] because, as they say of friendship, a painting lets the absent be present”[3], wrote Alberti. In the same way that colors influence one another and the light also changes the quality of what we see, encounters between people can transform their experiences and work. The coexistence with other artists from the coast, memories of a sunny day, and shared technical knowledge are the fundamental materials that create the works, as well as the encounters between them and whoever else is interested in spending time in front of these friendship-paintings, evoking other images. Perhaps these are provisional, infinite Nights. As abundant as the number of nights there are / there may exist / there may be..
—
[1] ALBERTI, Leon Battista. On Painting. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 142. Translated by Rocco Sinisgalli.
[2] Idem, pp. 31-32.
[2] Idem, p. 44.
Satin Nights is also the result of the artist’s research on and interest in “silicogravura”, which is the practice of sand bottle art, in which images – mostly landscapes – are created from the juxtaposition of colorful sand placed in translucent bottles. Siebra does not represent these objects; however, she establishes with them a profound dialogue, both in terms of her pictorial approach featuring fast chromatic, perhaps unexpected, transitions, and in terms of a sense of belonging. It is not by chance that the exhibition also presents the work of artists who have kept this ancient technique alive: Dudui (Carlos Eduardo da Rocha) and Edgar Freitas.
The oil and egg tempera works are made with overlayers that produce a dense atmosphere, in which colors impact one another, in the same way that the sea water reflects the light in the sky, wet sand is darker and vegetation creates patches on dunes. “It is evident that colors vary because of light”, stated the Renaissance thinker Leon Battista Alberti, “since every color in shade does not appear as [the same color] placed under the rays of light.” [1] Colors oscillate by nature, as well as light and the tide.
Alberti, whose 15th century treaty is considered the first one to systematize a theory on painting, declares: “As a painter, I have […] this opinion about colors: that through their mixing one generates an almost infinite number of colors; but that among painters there are authentic kinds of colors conforming to the number of the four elements, from which numerous species are obtained. […] There is the color of fire that they call red; then the color of air as well, which is called sky blue or azure; the color of water is green. The earth, instead, has the color of ashes.” [2] This is not trivial. By connecting the colors he sees as “authentic” to the four elements, Alberti is proposing a close relationship between painting and nature, as if they were made of the same matter: a relationship of interdependence.
Perhaps it is possible to say that Siebra’s works also arise from the encounter between artist and place, its colors, the matter from which it is made, the dyed sand placed in the bottles. They are not, therefore, disinterested compositions, but rather a sort of landscape — both natural and human — transfigured into painting, from darkness into a dense matter loaded with affection.
The images are what they appear to be: the sea, the sky, the sand, a vase of flowers, a jewelry box, a woman combing her hair. However, like in the song from which the exhibition borrows its title, the images evoke several other images that inhabit the spectator’s memory, always diverse and uncertain, and dependent on personal experiences.
There is a sense of generosity in Paula Siebra’s work, which is patiently built with small brushstrokes, with the accumulation of pigments: existence is always in relation to something else, in a sort of joint enterprise. For instance, the blue of the sky or sea in Falésias e areia molhada [Cliffs and Wet Sand] is alternated with an orangish tone underneath and around it. The iconographic elements also change meaning when placed side by side. Inside the jewelry box in Coisas da minha mãe [My mother’s things], there is an open lipstick, a glass bottle, and, amongst other objects, a pair of closed eyes. Underneath them, droplet-shaped earrings are turned into tears, echoing the curtain at the entrance of the exhibition room. Pearls are water that is precious — they are also an enigma, a personal story. Nothing exists except as a group. The woman in Mulher penteando o cabelo [Woman Combing her Hair], with her hair free from salt, seems to be recalling recent events, and the shape of her body brings into mind popular sculptures and wooden ex-votos, art objects that are deeply ingrained in the life and body of those who make them.
“Painting certainly has in itself a truly divine power […] because, as they say of friendship, a painting lets the absent be present”[3], wrote Alberti. In the same way that colors influence one another and the light also changes the quality of what we see, encounters between people can transform their experiences and work. The coexistence with other artists from the coast, memories of a sunny day, and shared technical knowledge are the fundamental materials that create the works, as well as the encounters between them and whoever else is interested in spending time in front of these friendship-paintings, evoking other images. Perhaps these are provisional, infinite Nights. As abundant as the number of nights there are / there may exist / there may be..
—
[1] ALBERTI, Leon Battista. On Painting. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 142. Translated by Rocco Sinisgalli.
[2] Idem, pp. 31-32.
[2] Idem, p. 44.
The color in transition in memory
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.
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.
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.
Color of beaten earth: instability and love in Paula Siebra's work
Mariana Leme,
2021
I am a girl who dreams of leisure, always have. Reverie has always been necessary to my existence. [...]
Always one wedded to the couch, the back porch, the swing, I want to see the world standing still. — bell hooks
In Paula Siebra's studio, a fresh house in the historic center of Fortaleza, some of her works are finished, others in progress and also a considerable number of studies: on paper, on canvas, writings; fragments of ideas, lives and things that populate the artist's imagination. Although restricted to an increasingly smaller number of people, a workplace that is pleasant and quiet “is as necessary [...] as water is to growing things”[1], in the words of the great intellectual bell hooks, according to which love is a political act, a transforming force [2]. I remember discovering notes on one of the walls of the studio about “people of my street”: Juvenal, a suspicious-looking man; the portrait sketch of a white-haired woman on a green background; another who poses seated, with her hands in her lap and a timid smile. In this case, painting is not abstract work that can be done anywhere, but an exercise of belonging, deeply anchored in the material reality, both of the craft itself and of the reality around it. In this case, painting is not abstract work that can be done anywhere, but an exercise in belonging, deeply anchored in the material reality, both to the craft itself and to the reality around it.
For hooks, unlike a passive feeling, love represents a constant practice of “care, commitment, trust, knowledge, responsibility and respect”[3], which does not mean denying the reality of institutionalized injustice, but making a conscious choice of how one responds to it. In fact, comfort, beauty and care (both in material and symbolic terms) should not be exclusive to an elite, but on the contrary: the political horizon of society as a whole.
On one of the studio's tables, there are ground pigments, oils and tools for the preparation of paints: a slow, artisanal and meticulous activity, which carries a centuries-old tradition. It is not a matter of technical preciosity, however: the matter of painting and the sheer exercise of this craft – quotidian, reiterated – carry within themselves a knowledge that is profoundly connected to the images produced by Siebra, along with her conceptual research, in a broad manner. A wisdom that is drawn from the body, from time itself, and which is decanted in fragments and in superimposed layers.
Despite the apparent calmness of the images, the colors are unstable, whose optical effect can change depending on the others with which they are combined. The earthy backgrounds applied to the canvas before or after shades of gray produce a subtle conflict, perceptible only to those who choose to observe the works for a longer period of time. It matters little. Tensions will be there, independent of the “subject”, which the Western tradition elected as the center of the universe.
On the surface – and the surface is fundamental to painting – Siebra’s work dialogues both with ordinary and often handcrafted objects, such as vases, saints, mugs, laces, and with a tradition of painting that flourished above all in the Netherlands in the 17th century. Philosopher Tzvetan Todorov, in his book Éloge du quotidien, states that the genres of painting are not only distinct but are part of a hierarchy established “over the centuries [...] , a reflection of a conception of the world's order”[4]. According to this scheme, “the inanimate, mineral and vegetable world is the lowest.”
Contrary to hierarchy and deeply influenced by Protestant religiosity, painters from Northern Europe began to represent ordinary life from an ontological dignity: “women who do the cleaning are placed on the pedestals of the saints and heroes of antiquity”[5], as if banal events were as important as, or even more so, prominent historical or mythological personalities.“ Dutch painting”, states Todorov, “does not deny virtues and vices, but transcends them in delight in the face of mundane existence.”[6]
Would this praise of beauty receive a similar meaning to that of care in bell hooks? It is difficult to say, but perhaps there is some point of contact, in the sense that it is pleasant to look at a painting by Johannes Vermeer, which extrapolates sheer delight: “The solitary space is sometimes a place where dreams and visions enter and sometimes a place where nothing happens [...] It is this stillness, this quietude, needed for the continued nurturance of any devotion to artistic practice,” says hooks.
However, this is not an uncritical praise of ordinary life, as if it were possible to sublimate the profound inequality that structures society. If the artists of the so-called Dutch “golden age” could neglect that the country’s wealth was the result of brutal exploitation – including the physical distance from the plantations –, avoiding such conflicts in a former colony like Brazil, the red-hot country, is much more difficult.
For this reason, in Siebra's work, not only are the colors unstable, but the images themselves suggest a permanent, albeit subtle, tension. In Duas Estacas e Ilha, for example, the fragile pieces of painted wood seem to support the mountain, creating a strange landscape. But not merely are they stuck in the soft, shifting beach sand, they barely touch the island. They are millimeters, capable of destabilizing the entire landscape, even more than the sinuous volumes of their shadows projected on the ground.
Many of the paintings are developed on layers of color and memory, like peeled or sun-bleached walls when maintenance funds are scarce and other things are more urgent than a well-finished facade. Perhaps these are a testament to the precariousness of existence, but even so, someone took care to draw two symmetrical little boats at the door. Or stars.
In addition to tradition, memory and time, there is also humor, showing that nothing is quite what it seems, despite the traditional (and elitist) solemnity of oil painting. In Nu na rede (Naked on a hammock), a man is lying down as described in the title, with the view from his window in the background. Of the same orange color, skin and fabric almost intertwine, and an unsuspecting spectator would hardly notice his erect penis, a rare iconography in the history of art, whose sexism privileged nudity and the “availability” of female bodies for the spectator’s delight, ideally a white man.
In another image, a yellow lamp – a more or less direct reference to the tradition of still lifes – is supported by an iron structure that resembles four rolls of toilet paper that are not at all solemn, and, in a third, the figure of the girl with a mirror does not respond to the expectations of contact – her oblique gaze returns to herself, creating a promise of complicity, never achieved. In Cascavel, a bouquet blooms on the roof of the house; in Merenda com suspiros maybe only Brazilians (and some Portuguese speakers) will understand the two main words of the title. The image is there in its rawness, seemingly without mysteries. But to decipher this supposed “crudeness” it is necessary to experience it: a snack is not just any meal; the suspiros are sweets made from egg whites with sugar, whose name also means a sigh of homesickness. What can we say about Café com pão (Coffee with bread), an almost tautological painting, in which a cup of coffee and a loaf of bread are represented? (In São Paulo we say “French bread”, in Ceará it is called “carioquinha”, in an affectionate reference to the inhabitants of the city of Rio de Janeiro.)
This instability, this paroxysm that permeates the artist's work are significant: to understand the painting, it is not enough to have a literate knowledge that deciphers – arrogantly and taxonomically – the delicacies represented. Café com pão is much more than just coffee with bread. At the same time, they are not “exotic” images, neither to foreign eyes nor to those from other regions of the country. But knowing the names will be as superficial as the almost flat surface of the painting, as if the artist were proposing a game between the objects and the spectator, whose understanding also depends on a previous experience of affection. In other words, Siebra seems to make fun of the indifference or “neutrality” desired by Western art, or the supposed objectivity of still lifes. Someone who doesn't know Brazil will hardly be able to grasp the deeper meaning of the paintings and their atmosphere, even if they don't present themselves as the exotic customs of a strange people. However, the care with which the meal table is set remains, as well as the suggestion of the fresh breeze, and we can all experience it.
In her paintings, Siebra uses earthy tones reminiscent of Siena, a pigment widely used during the Renaissance (the name refers to the Italian city) which, when raw, has an ocher color and, when heated, turns reddish brown. The sites where this compound of iron and manganese oxides were traditionally found are depleted, and it has been synthetically produced since the mid-20th century. It is interesting to think that European extractivism also destroyed – and literally – one of its most symbolic lands.
In Brazil, earthy tones may recall the recent destruction by mining waste in cities like Brumadinho, an announced tragedy that claimed the lives of hundreds of people. It was also mining that, in the 18th century, destroyed the lives of thousands of other people, and built on their mostly black bodies the cities that are now considered “heritage of humanity”, such as Ouro Preto, Tiradentes, Mariana and Diamantina.
Colors, in the context of a colonial-extractive society, are never exempt. At the same time, and despite the violence, the Jequitinhonha Valley region, where Diamantina is located, is one of the most important places for the production of ceramics, where people invent their existence from clay. This imagery also feeds Siebra's work, for example in Imbuzeiro, in which the woman's arms and the tree's branches seem to be consubstantiated, sculpted in soft orange-brown clay, just as the artist's self-portrait dialogues with some long-necked ex-votos, made in ceramics in several states of the Northeast.
Thus, the color of the earth can be a testimony of a profound pain, but also of affective experiences and an exercise of freedom, aesthetic creation and emancipation from the moist, fertile clay. As in the verses of another great intellectual, Beatriz Nascimento: “Joy of sitting on the earth / From the top of this hill / Carefully shooing insects away / With a lot of heat inside and out / As it hasn’t been for a long time, / My original beauty / Not rushing for anything.”[7]
bell hooks, in the memoir about her childhood – whose title, Bone Black, refers to the black pigment obtained from the carbonization of bones – says that, in her rural school, students sold tickets to performances in order to raise funds, and that rich people bought many of them. She recalls that “their flesh [of rich and white people] is often the color of pigs in the storybook” and that children learned about color from crayons:
In addition to the destruction engendered by mining companies, gold panning and colonization in general – including in our imagination – the earthy tones out of which most of Siebra’s paintings are made can also signify the browns of “all good things.” The yard of beaten earth on which pau-de-fita is played, the clay that will shape the utensils that filter water and keep it at a pleasant temperature, the brushing of vegetables and fruits that allows some autonomy to smallholders – nothing further from the modernist stereotype of the “Brazilian worker”: poor, alienated, sufferer, and who would rather be dependent on guardianship. After all, as the carnival artist Joãozinho Trinta used to say: “those who like poverty are intellectuals.”
If the society in which we live is marked by profound violence, there is also love, as responsibility, respect and knowledge, of those who seek to face this state of affairs. It is a daily effort that requires commitment and patience. The love of someone who weaves bobbin laces to decorate their own home and also as a source of income. Sitting on the porch, feeling the breeze from the sea.
[1] hooks, bell. “Women Artists: The Creative Process. In: her Art on My Mind (New York: The New Press, 1995): 125-132
[2] hooks, bell. “All About Love”. New Visions. New York :William Morrow, 2000. In page 13, the author states: “To begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling is one way in which anyone using the word in this manner automatically assumes accountability and responsibility.” hooks, in a sad coincidence, left us on the same day that I discovered Paula’s work
[3] Ibidem, 2020, p. 7.
[4] TODOROV, Tzvetan. Éloge du quotidien: Essai sur la peinture hollandaise du XVIIe siècle. Paris: Points, 2009, p. 12.
[5] Ibidem, 2009, p. 110.
[6] Ibidem, 2009, p. 109.
[7] NASCIMENTO, Beatriz. Rocio. In: Rattz, Alex; Gomes, Bethânia (Org). Todas (as) distâncias: poemas, aforismos e ensaios de Beatriz Nascimento. Salvador: Editora Ogum’s Toques Negros, 2015, p. 32.
[8] hooks, bell. Bone Black:Memories of Girlhood. Nova York: Henry Hold & Co., 1996, p. 7-8.