Juliana Gontijo, Foz e Fronteira, 2018

At 33 years old, artist Juliana Gontijo, born in Belo Horizonte, still has the same affection for geography that she had when she had to choose between her and Fine Arts when applying for a place in college. She ended up following the paths of art, but took with her, in the research at the heart of her work, several of the sciences that make up geography.

In her first solo exhibition at Galeria Murilo Castro, in Belo Horizonte, and since she started to be represented by her, Juliana brings together works created from a trip she took to Acre, where she visited spaces of indigenous experience. She had already had this contact before, whether from an artistic or sociological point of view: “What I found on these trips was a intersection what I was already doing with a perspective of this aspect, it was always about landscape, territory and body,” she explains. 

In the paintings presented in this exhibition, Risco, Juliana works with a layout that defines a territorial border, borders that, according to her, cannot be considered definitive when we talk about the formation of Brazil: “The idea is to be the all the time tensioning a line that is cartographic, but also the limits of thought”. This is because, in addition to simulating maps with territory and borders, Juliana also works with the word on the screen.

She says that one of her processes for formulating thoughts written in pencil consists of references to her readings, which she lets get lost over time. Juliana writes the passages she likes on slips of paper and keeps them in a box, taking them out later. The reflections on top of these excerpts form the thoughts written in the paintings.

Juliana also presents the exhibition Time is Relentless, curated by Wagner Nardy, at MAMAM (Museum of Modern Art Aloísio Magalhães), in Recife, opening on April 25 at 19pm. The exhibition at the Murilo Castro gallery, in Belo Horizonte, ended on April 27.


Sign up for our newsletter

Leave a comment

Please write a comment
Please write your name