After exhibiting, in 2008, a series by Cristina Canale (Rio de Janeiro, 1961) whose theme revolved around animals, Nara Roesler Galery now presents five paintings on canvas that are part of the exhibition Sem Palavras, in which women highlight the poetics of the works. The artist, who will also show seven works on paper, became interested in the feminine universe in Berlin, where she lives. Her interest progressively became the center of her recent production. “They are experienced women and, therefore, have an aesthetic load”, Canale emphasizes.
In her new series, one of the most prominent contemporary Brazilian painters, who was part of the famous Geração 80, creates scenic atmospheres in which a moment, whose pictorial power is unique, opens small spaces to impregnate the subjective imaginary of each spectator. According to the exhibition’s curator, Jacopo Crivelli Visconti, the figuration that exists in her work has no mimetic ambition. “On the other hand, it is necessary to go beyond a formalist interpretation: in Cristina Canale’s paintings there is a deadlock in the narrative. Besides being presented with the same clarity and kept in a state of suspension and lack of definition that is analogue of what characterizes the struggle between abstraction and figuration, this deadlock oscillates between the construction of recognizable, almost conventional, stories in its apparent linearity (a wedding, a trip to the zoo, a violin class, etc.) and the abyss of a dive with no return into the speechlessness of the pure color”, analyses the critic.
To Jacopo Crivelli Visconti, stories told by these paintings are not necessarily committed with the reality we are familiar with; they could melt at any time, dissolving into something unrecognizable. “This latent dissolution is the threat that hovers, as a death foretold, over all characters of Cristina Canale’s stories.”
Cristina Canale, who participated in the Bienal Internacional de São Paulo in 1991, lives in Germany, but has a studio in Rio de Janeiro. She moved abroad in 1993, when she was granted a scholarship from DAAD (The German Academic Exchange Service), in Düsseldorf Art Academy. Today, her works are exhibited in prominent galleries and art centers in Brazil, Germany, United States, France and Portugal. Some of her most significant exhibitions were: Geração 80 and solo shows at Instituto Tomie Ohtake and at Van der Mieden Gallery, in Antwerp.
