Shirley Paes Leme (Cachoeira Dourada, GO, 1955). Lives and works in São Paulo.
However grandiose and towering some of Shirley Paes Leme's works may be, they will always be dominated and made intimate to the observer by the memory that her constructive technique emits.
However “strange” they may look at first sight, Leme’s sculptures maintain a certain familiarity and structural, utility capacity that, when revealed, complicate the simple inclusion of her work in a tradition that ignores any influx other than just those of erudite extraction.
Shirley Paes Leme works as if she were the first artist (not that before here there ever was “the” first artist), the first human being to create forms in space to populate the world, in an interaction between the being and matter. Her works are strange and familiar because they carry within both the unusual aspect of the absolutely original form and the obstructive limits of an archaic, timeworn technique.
It is at this intersection (and not this “synthesis”) between erudite art and craftwork, it is at this “contradictory” place – where so many other Brazilian artists are positioned – that the artist helps expand the limits of contemporary art, granting it a character that is not only erudite and authoritarian, but equally popular, reconciliatory, capable of bringing different postures in line with each other that in other spheres would be mutually exclusive.
However grandiose and towering some of Shirley Paes Leme's works may be, they will always be dominated and made intimate to the observer by the memory that her constructive technique emits.
However “strange” they may look at first sight, Leme’s sculptures maintain a certain familiarity and structural, utility capacity that, when revealed, complicate the simple inclusion of her work in a tradition that ignores any influx other than just those of erudite extraction.
Shirley Paes Leme works as if she were the first artist (not that before here there ever was “the” first artist), the first human being to create forms in space to populate the world, in an interaction between the being and matter. Her works are strange and familiar because they carry within both the unusual aspect of the absolutely original form and the obstructive limits of an archaic, timeworn technique.
It is at this intersection (and not this “synthesis”) between erudite art and craftwork, it is at this “contradictory” place – where so many other Brazilian artists are positioned – that the artist helps expand the limits of contemporary art, granting it a character that is not only erudite and authoritarian, but equally popular, reconciliatory, capable of bringing different postures in line with each other that in other spheres would be mutually exclusive.
