The 15 images on canvas and on paper that make up this exhibition of Cristina Canale (Rio de Janeiro, 1961), revolve around scenes in which domestic animals, armchairs, pool tables, etc., interact with one another. These elements structure the spaciality of the canvas. They are interiors where dogs and cats somehow replace the human figure, or are brought in contact with the “civilization”, as a giraffe in the zoo, or a horse at the Jockey Club. In some works the artist fills the images with irony, by portraying design furniture and environments that could have been taken out of an interior design magazine, where the pets behave as the owners of the house.
“Different from landscape, the interiors bring me a spaciality of planes more defined and closer, another repertoire of forms, with more geometric and architectural structures”, declares the artist. That way, she believes she can play more with the painting of surface/concrete and its repertoire (squares and losanges rhythm – tiles). The animals, through gestural and organic treatment, contrast with the architectural environment.
“Nevertheless, despite the focus on the figure, the resolution of the work happens through abstract values, colour is the structuring element.” Besides the paintings on canvas, works on paper will be exhibited for the first time in São Paulo. In them, as in the paintings, Canale mixes pictorial and drawing solutions. According to her, the paper allows another balance of these languages and another sensibility of matter. The material is another as well, because on the paper works Canale uses watercolour, crayon and graphite, whereas on the canvas she basically uses oil and crayon.
According to Luiz Camillo Osório, what is noticeable in the works of Cristina Canale is an obstinate attention towards the means of the painting itself – its modern facet – at the same time that they produce on the surface of the canvas a repertoire of sensations that intensify our opening to the world. “Contrary to the figurative tradition, there is not a scene before the painting, but something that evolves from the play of forces in chromatic and graphic powers”. It is a figure without representation, without narration, constructed from pictorial sensations and in the name of a liberation of the ways of seeing the compressed models of visibility. Above all, Canale’s painting is more stain than line, submitting the figure to chromatic palpitations and not allowing the configuration to stabilize itself. In this vibration, things do not settle and are always contaminating themselves, in a constant metamorphosis”, states the critic.
Cristina Canale, who participated at the São Paulo International Biennial in 1991, lives in Germany but has a studio in Rio de Janeiro. She moved countries in 1993 when she was granted a scholarship from D.A.A.D. (Academic Service of the German Government) to study at the Academy of Arts of Düsseldorf. Today her work is shown in galleries and art centers throughout Brazil, Germany and other countries such as the USA, France and Portugal.
