Maria Laet's work is a gentle projection of her personality. Both have the dreamlike essence that springs from a quiet, affective and selective imagination. The new exhibition, on view at the Marília Razuk gallery, is an ode to the poetic, with twists and turns, developed at a special moment for this young artist who is preparing to perform at the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo. The eleven works, including videos, photographs, monotypes, objects and an installation, become an intimate ceremony with nature. Some of them have the density and lightness of a fog, all very intimate and full of analytical imagination. The basting in the earth appears once again on the surface, but now they provoke tension between place and space, and seem to want to stop the rhythm of the roots, intertwined in deep and endless movement.
Everything in Maria Laet generates poetry, as in the series in which “notebooks” with white, delicate pages, without any trace or writing, converse with other works such as the photo of a forest surrounded by whitish mist. On the whole, style superimposes form in the domain of shadow, light and gesture. In the installation, which calls for public participation, there is a political whisper. The small space with black walls, with a floor full of steel balls that move disoriented by the presence of man, stages the conquest of places.
In the videos that are added to the exhibition, breathing guides, takes the visitor from the optical plane and leads him to a sensitive experience. In one of them, a tuba musician has the sound of his instrument sealed, and the “concert” is performed by the character's breathing in and out. In another video, she mixes procedures and poetics of nature, where the interest is in the swaying of a coconut tree, which breathes in the same cadence as the tuba musician in the previous video. This universe so particular in the work of Maria Laet seems to speak to a tone of her emotional life. She is a self-confessed admirer of the work of Ana Mendieta, a Cuban artist, who mysteriously died at the age of 37, after falling naked from the 33rd floor of a building in New York, when she was married to the American minimalist Carl Andre, an episode that has not yet been elucidated. Maria Laet and Ana Mendieta work with the land art, silence and capture tensions of human existence in its environment
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