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.