'Wild Landscape IV' (2024), Leda Catunda. Photo: Eduardo Ortega. Courtesy [Courtesy] Fortes D'Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo/Rio de Janeiro
'Wild Landscape IV' (2024), Leda Catunda. Photo: Eduardo Ortega. Courtesy [Courtesy] Fortes D'Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo/Rio de Janeiro

U a cataract of skirts in Arabia, an Eldorado in the Egyptian rainforest, the great lake-store of an airport, the feast of Saint Thomas in a baroque province, the modern waste city, the cathedral never built in a corner of the northern world, and an altar of the largest Fabergé egg never seen before – these are some of the places to which the images that come together in these types of objects that behave like large tapestries, cushions, footrests and armrests are projected to us, with their printed, rubberized and colorful, and their fringes that advance puffy, often harassing to the touch.

It turns out that the landscape entered these works as their first organizing element: there is always sky, horizon, often lake. Who knows, not exactly landscape as a genre, but as a necessary condition for these works to always refer to another place, which, in its frank impossibility, as it is too composite and incongruous, nevertheless reaches a much more materially verifiable reality than the mere idyllic, arcadian image of some lost place; These are, after all, landscapes that are already saturated with bags, labels, tags, which are already prepared for tourism, including the presence of those brands whose logos already resemble former illustrious acquaintances – those quasi-characters with which we feel at home: here, Wilson, there, the good fellow who appears in the bag of rice...

If there is something that cannot be missed in these works, it is the constant questioning of “another place”; but these are landscapes that are no longer dreamlike, they do not allow the subject to be absorbed in their paradisiacal plots: they are often confused with prints of all sorts; they have a speed of filling spaces with scraps, colors and information coming from different places. They react, finally, to a compulsion towards totalization or accumulation: the works close in on themselves, round themselves off, offer themselves as small cosmos, in which the most discrepant things must submit to an encompassing order. And yet, made of easily detachable, pending parts, of frankly disparate, volumetrically dissonant origins, these works force this totality to self-recognize itself in its shamelessness. Firstly, a strange way of belonging to their own immediate context, a country already long ago abstracted in some tropical exoticism, however without wanting to catch it in its endogenous and indulgently national iconography; After all, the other places in which these works are revealed are so empty of substance, density, and history of their own, that, at one point, they seem to correspond to any place that could be called another, distant, exotic, incongruous – ribs from which it could be come out an Eve painted with the colors of Adam's rib; wild virgin forest, topped by strolling camels; golden paradises that must have learned to form themselves with Las Vegas, Miami and the theme parks and junk shops around the globe; or, in other terms, inconsistencies that no longer admit any safe, genuine ground, without stridently revealing their mythification.

To all these landscapes that are as impossible as they are very likely to be immediately located in a contemporary imagination in which many things that do not come from a common place can occupy the same semantic field without major problems, there is then added the scale and format of ready-made objects to respond very directly to the body of whoever sees them, sometimes hanging far enough from the wall to give the impression that they could be embraced in a hug; other times, almost inviting the movement of a light palm; or, still others, pleated, supposing that they could eventually perhaps be worn – equally fulfilled promises of a compulsion towards empathy, in which everything that is formless, strange, abject, must, in the end, return to immediate and end up making sense to an observer always eager to possess objects that defy any difficulty.

By the way, these works insightfully display the habit of appropriating things and images; they live off the rates of displacement of objects within their particular universe. A simple glance and you soon see jeans transformed into surfaces to be painted, shopping bags that have barely decomposed to be added to the canvas, t-shirts printed with movie posters. A polyphony, then, that does not seem to immediately deny the memory of the anthropophagic eating habit, a readiness to acclimatize to social history, the variety of tastes and origins of the objects that are swallowed there.

However, the very way in which they combine their disparities is immediately ambiguous: on the one hand, the language of making garments dominates, sewing, riveting, finishing, the overlapping of fabrics, the volume acquired by the overlapping of pieces. and patchwork, which leads to the structure of such objects being offered as a complex composition, completely opposed to a distracted accumulation of fragments; but, on the other hand, such pieces of existing things tend to accommodate each other visually due to a kind of uniformization of their volume, chromatic intensity, imbalance of size and shape due to the astute distribution of paint over the surfaces, as if that first structuring was superimposed on a more common practice of customizing parts.

The result is that, as soon as they absorb them, the works also say goodbye to the discontinuities of their materials, to the shock that could be produced by the encounter of things that come from different places. Little seems remains of that kind of promise of “impertinence of underdevelopment” that once fueled a passion for everything that was dirty, marginal, peripheral, capable of being astonished by the violence of a present time made up of perplexities and irresolute contradictions.

These works know that everything they collect bears the mark of what has already passed, which no longer offers enough respite to provoke any scandal. On the contrary, they seem to affirm very resolutely that, whatever they may contain, whatever the nature of the images or things they attach to them, everything there will be reassuringly recognizable, familiar. No matter how big they are, no matter how full of unfamiliar elements, their strangeness will not lie in their choice of materials, in their inconsequentiality, but rather in the question of why they result in compounds of things that are always slightly outdated.

In fact, it is not the frisson or the sigh that animates these works, but that kind of gravity of the drape of a fabric that has stopped moving and is now heavy. They suppose, in their accumulation, in their layers of the same things, many past objects gathered together, but they would be a disservice to anyone who wanted to examine any history of fashion, of the textile industry when looking at them. If they have a huge number of objects, their volume sometimes corresponds to just a fraction of the fabric, one or two of the prints in vogue last season, no more. If they grow larger and fatter, it is not because they carry or assume they are capable of narrating the thickening of a true accumulated experience.

In terms of their materials, they are not works with much of a past. Rather, they deal with the gigantic material dimension of a month or two ago in the time of circulation of the images and objects they consume and from which they derive as many coincidences and analogies as can be formulated in one fell swoop: a saint figured close to a section of decorative pattern, and the work looks baroque, and with the addition of patchwork, little Saint John flags; in another work, a banana tree, and everything becomes tropicalized in a Moroccan exoticism; a chess, and the architectural element comes hastily to help the meaning of an image; geometrical symbolic forms, and, suddenly, Klee, theosophy; gold and blue, and the same element that in another work was a skirt, now forms a gigantic oval stained glass window.

Let's face it, it is not at all difficult to guess in these works how much they exude references to the history of art. But we know that looking like things already seen in art does not justify them. Maybe it's that they don't really pay reverence to art; or, perhaps, it is also that they do not exactly need the tradition of art to be understood. All they do with that nonsense of things they show off is to call them art very quickly, before one can even think that they are remains, things of culture, that they are of good or bad taste – none of that matters. What arrives at the work as any fabric print that ends up on the finishing edge of one of these objects is quickly repainted; the ink causes the printed print to be converted, by quick coverings, into painting, enamels the low-load impression it received, and, through a reduction to the manuality of the brush, that print now appears to possess something of the character just indicated with that a Matisse gives rise to an aroma of an imaginary world lost in the handling of patterns.

The procedures for Leda with and on their objects they stylize them, they impose on them a personal way of behaving, the justification for which is not offered in this or that work, but only in an overview of their trajectory. If those fringes with rounded ends resemble organically phallic objects here, it is because they learned long ago, in the artist's career, to signify tongues, then insect wings, then drops, and now they know very well how to acquire volume without ceasing to be seen as a vocabulary specific to your work.

These works are rooted in self-references to the artist's own work, but they are, rather than a repetition, an extensive formal narrative, which, to be explained, must be observed in the time of its development – ​​since when they could be explained as individual “findings”. in one, another or another work from the beginning of this trajectory (it would be relatively simple to observe how the entry into the works of Leda, the procedure of painting the connection areas between one patch and another glued or sewn; or, when she started pasting small comics inside larger paintings or canvases; or, even, when objects began to hang from the wall towards the space – they melted, they were justified by an image of a waterfall, which then turned into species of fabric cut in the shape of drops, even before they looked like fingers, phalluses, and suddenly being assumed to be Saint John's flags, here, and tongues, there, or skirts, there).

There is no doubt that this contributes to the impression that this is now a work that presents itself with an air of “maturity”, perhaps being very suddenly associated with a repetition of formulas that would lead to a perception that the work had grown tired of inventing, and therefore had cooled into a belated version of itself. It would not be incorrect to say so; these works no longer justify their procedures of appropriation, insertion of objects, figures, in terms of a discourse more or less disguised as “avant-garde”; they are, such procedures, silently artistic, that is, they are no longer willing to reveal the fractures of their formal justifications due to the social, historical, ideological elements that they know they carry — elements of taste, origin, meaning of their prints . But that's the thing: offering themselves as “formalisms”, as “aesthetic” excesses is the way this work reaches the process of ultra-aestheticization that it knows it is destined for; or, in other words, to which he knows his materials are equally subject. The fashionable print that in a short time loses its unusual value and appears in the great universe of unimportant fabrics; the iconic image of the idea of ​​exoticism – a camel, who knows –, which, in a short time, becomes a mere logo; the unfathomable image of the thousand and one nights that is replaced by the more abstract composition of chains with golden straps hanging from a skirt. This is a work that offers itself in a frank process of autonomy in the face of the supposed impact of the objects that compose it, certainly no longer conflagrating them head on, but silently challenging their omnipresence in the sphere of culture with the self-affirmation of their plasticity over them.

Essay written by critic and art professor Carlos Eduardo Riccioppo to accompany the exhibition Wild Landscape, by Leda Catunda. The exhibition will be on display between August 10 and October 5, 2024, at Carpintaria, in Rio de Janeiro.


Sign up for our newsletter

Read alsoMore from author

Leave a comment

Please write a comment
Please write your name