Nara Roesler presents a solo booth by Brazilian Maria Klabin with recent paintings where sleeping figures and huge landscapes populated by strange figures, are paired with other scenes of stillness, silence, and drowsiness. Klabin’s impressive paintings are repositories of the gesture's trace, of the oil paint's density, of her broad, ambitious and fluid brushstrokes, behaving as architectural structuring of her compositions.
The artist’s process lies in constantly producing drawings, photographs, and annotations, drawn from her entourage, followed by an approach to painting that unfolds from her practice in other fields, such as dance, which she has practiced since childhood. Exemplary in this sense, are her large-scale landscape paintings, which take form through a highly physical process, like a choreography over the surface of the canvas, creating figurations through the encounter between two bodies, hers and the painting's.
The selection includes works emanating from observation initiated during the pandemic, as Klabin resumed a key theme in her repertoire: portraiture, focusing on the subject's individuality but also on the relationships between them and the space, transforming the scene into a domestic landscape.