Amelia Toledo at Independent (New York, 2026)
Amelia Toledo (1926-2017) was the grande dame of the ecological abstraction in Brasil. While her contemporaries approached the complexity of collective bodies and corporeal psyche (Lygia Pape, Lygia Clark); the soulful and transcendent body of language (Mira Schendel), and cosmic figural imagination (Tomie Ohtake), Toledo unwaveringly focused on the body of the earth, on nature as body and source of unintentional beauty.
Amelia Toledo, a paramount figure in the history of abstraction in Brasil, unstoppably experimented with materials, focusing on the hybrid nature of art objects and non-addressed beauty of natural beings, notably rocks and crystals, dust, corals, sand and shells. Rather than imitating the aspect of nature, Toledo focused on natural processes and operations, reproducing their agency and temporality in her works.
Early-on in her career, while working under William Turnbull in London, Amelia produced some arrestingly beautiful watercolors that echo through their visual density sediment processes in nature. These works anticipated her interest in the inherent opacity of transparent bodies, either artificial or natural, which led her to experiment with plastic and resin in the late 1960's, producing haptic spheres and sculptures in which transparency becomes the prismatic trap of light under pristine textures that appeal a visual-tactile approach.
Representation beyond and before mimesis was a permanent object of inquiry for Amelia Toledo. Therefore, her interest in reflecting surfaces capable of producing anamorphisms and deformation, her ceaseless mimicking of nature's power of metamorphosis and her fascination for body casting, indexes and marks, the resonant beauty of slowness in natural processes as showed in fossils and crystals.
But Amelia Toledo was never indifferent to her own time and the politics involved in her approach to art. As such in the 1970's, while Brazil was subjected to repression and authoritarianism, Amelia explicitly responded to the constraints against free expression in her series 'Emergencies'. It was a way to daringly define dictators as predators, embodying them in the tiger's traces over newspapers, and to call for resistance and uprising as signified by the mark of open human hands.
But 'Emergencies', as she titled this key group of works, also and more generally indicated Amelia Toledo's poetic impulsion towards the very notion of surging, thrusting, soaring, billowing, emerging, booming, blossoming, a central constituent of her observation of the world and therefore informing her artistic accomplishments.
Emergencies tell us literally about urgency as much as about the constant surging of forms. Late in her life, around the 1980's, her fascination for tracing and marks constituted the very basic, essential grammar of her late approach to painting trough repetitive marking over rough materials, summarizing both the opacity of art and the transparency of beauty.
— Luis Pérez-Oramas