Exhibition "Deborah Paiva (1950-2022): An Anthology"

To mark the beginning of celebrations for its first decade of activity in the Brazilian and international contemporary art market, the Janaina Torres Gallery presents the solo exhibition Deborah Paiva (1950–2022): An Anthology, curated by Thaddeus ChiarelliThe exhibition is scheduled to open on March 7, an 14 am - 18 pm, and remains on display until April 30, in Sao Paulo.

The exhibition brings together a unique collection of works spanning different periods in the career of Deborah Paiva (Campo Grande, 1950), an artist whose production has been consolidated through a rigorous investigation of painting as a language and field of reflection. Born in Mato Grosso do Sul and now based in São Paulo, this artist has built a body of work with a strong sense of freedom, remaining faithful to experimentation and outside the trends and fads of the art world.

His early works emerged in three dimensions, most of them large-scale and almost installation-like in nature. Over time, his research gradually shifted towards pictorial language, moving through strongly material investigations – with procedures similar to Arte Povera, using elements such as sand, straw, encaustic, and different densities of paint – and later focusing on the refinement of painting, with smaller formats and less material, more silent and introspective works.

This shift, however, is not solely a reflection of a biographical or psychological movement, but rather a stance taken regarding the very condition of painting at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries. Although Deborah Paiva's work frequently operates within the territory of hybridity between abstraction and figuration, rejecting the traditional dichotomy between these fields – which we see reflected in her canvases, with figure and background contaminating and dissolving each other, reaffirming her commitment to pictorial investigation as the primary condition of her work – Deborah insisted on returning to painting at a historical moment in which this language saw its... statement to be progressively questioned and displaced by more spectacular expressions.

Throughout her career, the artist did not limit herself to a fixed style, nor to a closed aesthetic program, and definitely did not opt ​​for combativeness as was the trend at that time. The artist's painting can be narrative or formal, planar or material, figurative or non-figurative, always assuming itself as an open field of possibilities. Another point that draws attention in her work is that the artist rejected the linear notion of the evolution of her poetics, avoiding the rigorous dating of her works, understanding the time of painting as the time of the making itself: the rhythm of the gesture and the duration of the work.

Much of her iconography, which gave her works their signature style from 2010 onwards, integrates abstraction with human figures—mostly female—presented from behind, in profile, or with their faces covered, as well as interiors and landscapes. These images, however, refuse to be reduced to the representation of the subject's existential solitude, and end up operating as a metaphor for the solitude of painting itself as an artistic language at the time, turned in on itself and relatively detached from the broader contemporary debate.

In this sense, as noted by the exhibition curator, Thaddeus Chiarelli, in your critical text accompanying the exhibition, the production of Deborah Paiva This approaches what Walter Benjamin defined as the "cult value" of a work of art. In consolidating her language and signature style, the artist privileged the intimate character of painting, deliberately distancing herself from monumentality and the logic of spectacle. Her work asserts itself in a silent presence, which demands attentive and decelerated enjoyment from the observer, in opposition to the logic of exhibition value that has come to dominate contemporary art since the advent of technical reproducibility.

As Chiarelli also points out, Paiva's work is structurally related to artists such as Iberê Camargo, Jasper Johns, Henri Matisse and Marie LaurencinThis dialogue does not occur through quotation or postmodern appropriation, but through profound affinities related to questions of pictorial language, especially regarding the blurring of boundaries between abstraction and figuration and the physicality of painting.

A critical review by Tadeu Chiarelli

To put together this exhibition, Thaddeus Chiarelli The text also proposes a critical review of his own previous interpretation of Deborah Paiva's work. In a text written in 1997, the curator had interpreted her production as a direct result of the supposed "liberation" of painting that occurred in the 1980s. Today, he recognizes this interpretation as mistaken, revising the notion that there had been a "return to painting" during that period. Tadeu acknowledges the fallacy of this premise – understood at that time by him and many in the art world – when he states that painting never disappeared, but lost prominence to other artistic modalities. Upon recognizing the limitations of this premise, Chiarelli acknowledges that this view prevented an understanding of the true complexity of Deborah Paiva's paintings. From then on, for the critic and curator, Deborah's work is understood not as the effect of a newly acquired freedom, but as a response to the isolation of contemporary painting, which, after losing its centrality in the artistic debate, turned inward as a form of survival as a language. Ultimately, for the curator:

Service
Exhibition Deborah Paiva (1950-2022): An Anthology
From March 7rd to April 30th
Tuesday to Friday, from 10 am to 18 pm and Saturdays, from 10 am to 16 pm.