Jeanete Musatti ( Sao Paulo, SP, 1944). Lives and works in São Paulo
"Jeanete Musatti's soul dwells in a geode. Sometimes it steps out for a walk, only to reveal some of the dazzling beauty hidden in that inner space, like a cosmos of platonic forms awaiting recognition. Her way as an artist is to mediate two worlds, that and this, poor pale mirror, narrow box, muffled echo.
Her most recent work, one hundred and twenty little boxes fit to keep precious stones, is actually her artistic DNA: every gene she carries is a matrix of images. Assembling proto - cells of soul images, Jeanete creates a speech, horizontally displayed as the written line, in which words, commas, quotation marks and dashes are direct visions of the other world, the world beyond reason, that she allows us to contemplate through magical peeping - holes in a white washed wall.
Minerals have always been her alter-ego. If in the past they were objects of desire, with time raw or precious stones have become language, have become symbols. Her work, as the one pursued by the old alchemists, is the eternal search for the glorified stone, hard matter impregnated with psyche and meaning.
As an eighteenth century traveler, Jeanete captures the Brazilian soul from its ancestral roots to the calamities of present day social exclusion. In contemporary Germany, she detects the horrors caused by the archetypal shadow in a box of burnt-out matches, a concentration camp in miniature. In Japan, she meets Aphrodite embodied in pearls. In her public squares, she materializes the invisible connections of which the mind and social life are made. She elevates the iridescence of the blue wings of our vulgarized butterfly to its symbolic dignity, this rich psyche of ours still so misunderstood.
Her scope widens, especially in two pieces exhibited in 2000 at The Art Museum of the Americas, in Washington D.C, anticipating what was to happen worldwise. America is a denudation of power structures. Women of Afghanistan synthesizes the crossroads the world is at, the maltreated gold of a painful repressed feminine principle. Our world, she reveals in her Imaginary Iconography, is a fragile meteor stuck in a chessboard.
The work of Jeanete Musatti is a potent hallucinogen, rare delight, an interval of transcendence in our incessant chain of automatic thoughts. Her work is a gentle knife that momentarily cuts through that flow. To contemplate it is to let oneself be conducted to the immemorial dimension of soul and it's images."
