Rigour and Simplicity
Olívio Tavares de Araujo - 2007
Shirley Paes Leme’s success and prestige as viewed in the context of art at present in Brazil – and also outside our national boundaries where, more and more, she has been exhibiting – have been quick, nearly vertiginous, and well-aimed. It can be said that her career started slightly over ten years ago when she obtained a doctor’s degree in the USA under a Fulbright scholarship and settled down in the city of Uberlândia, in the interior of Brazil, where she had been living before. In Brazil, alas, as is the custom, an artist establishes himself also through a sort of activism, his physical presence, his personal relationships, which nearly always compels him to live in one of the nation’s two cultural capitals – Rio or São Paulo. Shirley chose not to be in such a scheme and her success is due exclusively to the quality of her work, its self-imposed force and its wide array of seduction, which spans from a more immediate level to one more intellectually elaborate.
For reasons even of a generational nature, the two contemporary trends Shirley is related with, the minimal art and the arte povera, were victorious ones in the first half of the seventies when she started developing her art. However, it would be definitely inexact to class her under said trends as they are, in essence, quite different, not to say antinomical. One, so to speak, has a characteristic of a classical nature; the other, romantic. In minimalism, there is a pursuit of a maximum order expressed in a minimum of means, a semantic reduction consentaneous to that syntactic, a strict poetics, a constructivist language based on geometry, and certain formal values common to all classicisms: proportion, harmony, simplicity, exactness, clarity, precision. In the arte povera though, it is not the form, but the materials (precarious, and devoid of nobleness, such as those of traditional art) that are the true protagonists of the discourse. The form, as is its wont, instead of preceding, results from the supports, and is overt, in all opposed to the minimalist rigour. “It pleases me to speak of things fluid and elastic, of things devoid of lateral or formal perimeters”, states Gilberto Zorio, one of the most interesting artists of such a trend.
It so happens that the highly personal language of Shirley Paes Leme symbiotically comprises, and harmonizes, some opposites, as it does not spring from, nor does it comply with, any schools. It does originate, above all, from specifities of her temperament, her origins, her experiences and remembrances, from an overall ethos (if not pathos) that envelopes her, and not from her apprenticeship. It is clear that this had and has a paramount importance, principally at the end of a century in which the means of communication and Internet keep us updated as to what goes on in the world with a greater speed than that which goes on next door to us. It would be unthinkable the idea of a learned and most significant artist disengaged from the information circulation system. There lies no doubt that Paes Leme is consciously and deliberately inserted in a such a system; and there is no doubt either, that the strength and the power of communication in her work are due much more to the deep roots on which it is based. Despite somewhat worn-out, the word authenticity has to be touched upon. And more. Although the question of nationality in art is not at present fashionable – for the present trend is openly internationalizing, globalizing – it is necessary to speak of the presence of a certain Brazil, a transubstantiated one.
Paes Leme is, at one time, a sculptor and a draughtswoman. It strikes the eye the fact that her sculpture possesses a graphic nature, not a volumetric one. In other words, it is not her desire to create masses that will fill up a space, she does not trim a block, nor does she model or sculpt it in the strict sense of the term. Her pieces are created as if they were a three-dimensional drawing, made to lines which project from here to over there. This linear character, this graphism, becomes particularly evident in some of the wall pieces made with a few sticks to planes somewhat parallel to those of the background: these pieces have the impulse, the freedom and the fluency of a gesture by the hand which, using a crayon or a fine brush, would leave its mark upon a support. The invention of this type of sculpture, present in other more recent artists (in Zorio, David Smith, Eduardo Chillida, in many of the works by Calder and Anthony Caro), I believe harks back to Picasso (a draftsman above all). These hark back to those cubist guitars cut out from sheet metal at the same time of the “papier collés” – beginning of the 1910s – the end of the notions of block, carving, moulding, and the discovery (analogous to that of modern music when emphasizing silence as an active part of the discourse) of the possibilities of matter within the hollow, in the void. A graphic sculptor, it is not surprising that Paes Leme also devotes herself to drawing – not that preparatory, carried on just as an exercise or a project, but drawing as an autonomous and full-fledged language. Her activity in this field is not, definitely, a byproduct or a divertissement of idle hours. It is another channel of expression and no less effective, a bidimensional counterpoint to tridimensionality, conveying with a perfect syntactical adequacy the same contents. The drawings which make up the present exhibition have been carried out with smoke (a technique which has been employed by the artist for over 20 years), now at the very moment of combustion (the hand holding a candle or an oil lamp burning, and the paper recording its route), now through the impression of the soot onto the paper’s surface, said soot consisting of extremely tenuous smut flocks adhering to walls or hanging from ceilings in old buildings upcountry, a light, flimsy aggregate of cobwebs and dust blackened by smoke in the course of many years.
And these sooty smuts refer us to the question of the individual experiences and the transubstantiated portion of Brazil. Shirley Paes Leme was literally born upcountry between the states of Minas Gerais and Goiás: her mother, a farmer from Minas Gerais, was on a raft in the midst of the river bordering the two states, on her way to join her husband, Shirley’s father, a farmer from Goiás. This is a peculiar junction, bringing together distinct landscapes, histories and traditions – some leading to formal rigour, to the minimalist side of the work, others to the choice of the precarious materials in which the work is expressed, its arte povera side. In a catalogue for the exhibition in Washington, Tadeu Chiarelli, curator of the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, spoke also of an intersection between perfect erudition and a popular element inherited through artisanal tradition existing of long in the regions of the country’s central plains where Shirley was born and lives. And this does not at all collides with the interpretation herein proposed; perhaps, it is only cuts in different planes, there being maintained at any rate the idea of a tension between opposites. “Shirley Paes Leme works as though she were the first artist (...), the first human being to create forms into space in order to people the world in an interaction between being and matter”, writes Chiarelli. “Her works are strange and familiar because they carry within them both the unusualness of the form thoroughly original and the obstacles posed by the limits of an immemorial and archaic technique”. I do confess to being concerned as to the words obstacles and limits. We are aware that in technical terms the artist, since Wilhelm Worringer, has always invented the resources necessary for expressing his/her universe. The history of the art is not one of possibilities, it is one of wills. “In art, all things one can which one willed”, asseverates Worringer, “and that which one cannot, is because it was not in the path of artistic will”. The limitations of artisanship, if any, while instrument of expression, do become potentialities in the hands of the artist who adopts some of its procedures. There is no need to polemize, though.
It is a shame we cannot, for want of space, extend a discussion on Shirley’s two Brazils, the one in Minas, the other in Goiás. Brazilians will fully understand me. Foreigners will have to trust me a little bit. Minas Gearis (whose name means general mines) is today Brazil’s second state in terms of population and economic activities, but it ranked first in the eighteenth century when from its extremely rich soil there were extracted diamonds and gold in abundance. The typical landscape of Minas is one of hilly and closed horizons. Traditionally – and this is correct – to those native to Minas there is attributed a severe, contained Weltanschauung, reminiscent of those glorious aurific times. The mineiros, i.e., the natives of Minas, are laconic, somewhat messianic, and quite melancholy. From this mineral Minas (there are others) it is that Shirley has brought a parcimonious and strict component, the love of neat and geometrically structured forms, the restraint and absence of rhetoric in the works. Now, from the farms of Goiás, where she spent her childhood and adolescence, from an agricultural and pastoral economy, from the far horizons, she brings us the stripped simplicity of her materials, the wood sticks, the oxidized metal sheets, the animal guts (which she uses as graphic elements, and not as an improvement of a visceral nature) and the smoke that spiralled upwards and hanged on the corners of the old house. It is also part of the culture of Minas Gerais and Goiás a certain sportive ingeniousness which establishes a counterpoint to simplicity. Despite the rigour and the constructive intelligence, it is certain that the objects created are also pervaded by such ingenuity.
It appears to me that the work of Shirley Paes Leme is unique in the Brazilian art, with all of its consolidated inventiveness and formal originality. Brazilianity manifests itself on one level only, where this kind of phenomenon can occur convincingly: on that of the inner articulation of the language. The quality of permanence in the sculptures and drawings (and perhaps also their characteristic beauty, their immediate spellbinding power) lies in a highly complex synthesis of internationality and regionality, which reminds me of a famous saying by Tolstoy: “In order to be universal, one must start speaking of his own village”. That is what Paes Leme does as regards her villages (in particular, her inner ones), and probably malgré elle, as she certainly has not advanced this explicit purpose. And it is not in the multi-coloured pictures showing parrots, macaws and toucans, which are usually purchased by foreign tourists, that one finds one image of Brazil; these are imitations on a peripheral level, which ignore art’s true nature: a process, always, of symbolization, and not a simulacrum of the reality contemplated. It is in the universe – for that matter abstract, neither narrative nor thematic – of this subtle and original sculptor from Minas and Goiás, Shirley Paes Leme, that a small yet true portion of Brazil can be found.
Click here to download the DOC archive with the full text
Olívio Tavares de Araujo - 2007
Shirley Paes Leme’s success and prestige as viewed in the context of art at present in Brazil – and also outside our national boundaries where, more and more, she has been exhibiting – have been quick, nearly vertiginous, and well-aimed. It can be said that her career started slightly over ten years ago when she obtained a doctor’s degree in the USA under a Fulbright scholarship and settled down in the city of Uberlândia, in the interior of Brazil, where she had been living before. In Brazil, alas, as is the custom, an artist establishes himself also through a sort of activism, his physical presence, his personal relationships, which nearly always compels him to live in one of the nation’s two cultural capitals – Rio or São Paulo. Shirley chose not to be in such a scheme and her success is due exclusively to the quality of her work, its self-imposed force and its wide array of seduction, which spans from a more immediate level to one more intellectually elaborate.
For reasons even of a generational nature, the two contemporary trends Shirley is related with, the minimal art and the arte povera, were victorious ones in the first half of the seventies when she started developing her art. However, it would be definitely inexact to class her under said trends as they are, in essence, quite different, not to say antinomical. One, so to speak, has a characteristic of a classical nature; the other, romantic. In minimalism, there is a pursuit of a maximum order expressed in a minimum of means, a semantic reduction consentaneous to that syntactic, a strict poetics, a constructivist language based on geometry, and certain formal values common to all classicisms: proportion, harmony, simplicity, exactness, clarity, precision. In the arte povera though, it is not the form, but the materials (precarious, and devoid of nobleness, such as those of traditional art) that are the true protagonists of the discourse. The form, as is its wont, instead of preceding, results from the supports, and is overt, in all opposed to the minimalist rigour. “It pleases me to speak of things fluid and elastic, of things devoid of lateral or formal perimeters”, states Gilberto Zorio, one of the most interesting artists of such a trend.
It so happens that the highly personal language of Shirley Paes Leme symbiotically comprises, and harmonizes, some opposites, as it does not spring from, nor does it comply with, any schools. It does originate, above all, from specifities of her temperament, her origins, her experiences and remembrances, from an overall ethos (if not pathos) that envelopes her, and not from her apprenticeship. It is clear that this had and has a paramount importance, principally at the end of a century in which the means of communication and Internet keep us updated as to what goes on in the world with a greater speed than that which goes on next door to us. It would be unthinkable the idea of a learned and most significant artist disengaged from the information circulation system. There lies no doubt that Paes Leme is consciously and deliberately inserted in a such a system; and there is no doubt either, that the strength and the power of communication in her work are due much more to the deep roots on which it is based. Despite somewhat worn-out, the word authenticity has to be touched upon. And more. Although the question of nationality in art is not at present fashionable – for the present trend is openly internationalizing, globalizing – it is necessary to speak of the presence of a certain Brazil, a transubstantiated one.
Paes Leme is, at one time, a sculptor and a draughtswoman. It strikes the eye the fact that her sculpture possesses a graphic nature, not a volumetric one. In other words, it is not her desire to create masses that will fill up a space, she does not trim a block, nor does she model or sculpt it in the strict sense of the term. Her pieces are created as if they were a three-dimensional drawing, made to lines which project from here to over there. This linear character, this graphism, becomes particularly evident in some of the wall pieces made with a few sticks to planes somewhat parallel to those of the background: these pieces have the impulse, the freedom and the fluency of a gesture by the hand which, using a crayon or a fine brush, would leave its mark upon a support. The invention of this type of sculpture, present in other more recent artists (in Zorio, David Smith, Eduardo Chillida, in many of the works by Calder and Anthony Caro), I believe harks back to Picasso (a draftsman above all). These hark back to those cubist guitars cut out from sheet metal at the same time of the “papier collés” – beginning of the 1910s – the end of the notions of block, carving, moulding, and the discovery (analogous to that of modern music when emphasizing silence as an active part of the discourse) of the possibilities of matter within the hollow, in the void. A graphic sculptor, it is not surprising that Paes Leme also devotes herself to drawing – not that preparatory, carried on just as an exercise or a project, but drawing as an autonomous and full-fledged language. Her activity in this field is not, definitely, a byproduct or a divertissement of idle hours. It is another channel of expression and no less effective, a bidimensional counterpoint to tridimensionality, conveying with a perfect syntactical adequacy the same contents. The drawings which make up the present exhibition have been carried out with smoke (a technique which has been employed by the artist for over 20 years), now at the very moment of combustion (the hand holding a candle or an oil lamp burning, and the paper recording its route), now through the impression of the soot onto the paper’s surface, said soot consisting of extremely tenuous smut flocks adhering to walls or hanging from ceilings in old buildings upcountry, a light, flimsy aggregate of cobwebs and dust blackened by smoke in the course of many years.
And these sooty smuts refer us to the question of the individual experiences and the transubstantiated portion of Brazil. Shirley Paes Leme was literally born upcountry between the states of Minas Gerais and Goiás: her mother, a farmer from Minas Gerais, was on a raft in the midst of the river bordering the two states, on her way to join her husband, Shirley’s father, a farmer from Goiás. This is a peculiar junction, bringing together distinct landscapes, histories and traditions – some leading to formal rigour, to the minimalist side of the work, others to the choice of the precarious materials in which the work is expressed, its arte povera side. In a catalogue for the exhibition in Washington, Tadeu Chiarelli, curator of the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, spoke also of an intersection between perfect erudition and a popular element inherited through artisanal tradition existing of long in the regions of the country’s central plains where Shirley was born and lives. And this does not at all collides with the interpretation herein proposed; perhaps, it is only cuts in different planes, there being maintained at any rate the idea of a tension between opposites. “Shirley Paes Leme works as though she were the first artist (...), the first human being to create forms into space in order to people the world in an interaction between being and matter”, writes Chiarelli. “Her works are strange and familiar because they carry within them both the unusualness of the form thoroughly original and the obstacles posed by the limits of an immemorial and archaic technique”. I do confess to being concerned as to the words obstacles and limits. We are aware that in technical terms the artist, since Wilhelm Worringer, has always invented the resources necessary for expressing his/her universe. The history of the art is not one of possibilities, it is one of wills. “In art, all things one can which one willed”, asseverates Worringer, “and that which one cannot, is because it was not in the path of artistic will”. The limitations of artisanship, if any, while instrument of expression, do become potentialities in the hands of the artist who adopts some of its procedures. There is no need to polemize, though.
It is a shame we cannot, for want of space, extend a discussion on Shirley’s two Brazils, the one in Minas, the other in Goiás. Brazilians will fully understand me. Foreigners will have to trust me a little bit. Minas Gearis (whose name means general mines) is today Brazil’s second state in terms of population and economic activities, but it ranked first in the eighteenth century when from its extremely rich soil there were extracted diamonds and gold in abundance. The typical landscape of Minas is one of hilly and closed horizons. Traditionally – and this is correct – to those native to Minas there is attributed a severe, contained Weltanschauung, reminiscent of those glorious aurific times. The mineiros, i.e., the natives of Minas, are laconic, somewhat messianic, and quite melancholy. From this mineral Minas (there are others) it is that Shirley has brought a parcimonious and strict component, the love of neat and geometrically structured forms, the restraint and absence of rhetoric in the works. Now, from the farms of Goiás, where she spent her childhood and adolescence, from an agricultural and pastoral economy, from the far horizons, she brings us the stripped simplicity of her materials, the wood sticks, the oxidized metal sheets, the animal guts (which she uses as graphic elements, and not as an improvement of a visceral nature) and the smoke that spiralled upwards and hanged on the corners of the old house. It is also part of the culture of Minas Gerais and Goiás a certain sportive ingeniousness which establishes a counterpoint to simplicity. Despite the rigour and the constructive intelligence, it is certain that the objects created are also pervaded by such ingenuity.
It appears to me that the work of Shirley Paes Leme is unique in the Brazilian art, with all of its consolidated inventiveness and formal originality. Brazilianity manifests itself on one level only, where this kind of phenomenon can occur convincingly: on that of the inner articulation of the language. The quality of permanence in the sculptures and drawings (and perhaps also their characteristic beauty, their immediate spellbinding power) lies in a highly complex synthesis of internationality and regionality, which reminds me of a famous saying by Tolstoy: “In order to be universal, one must start speaking of his own village”. That is what Paes Leme does as regards her villages (in particular, her inner ones), and probably malgré elle, as she certainly has not advanced this explicit purpose. And it is not in the multi-coloured pictures showing parrots, macaws and toucans, which are usually purchased by foreign tourists, that one finds one image of Brazil; these are imitations on a peripheral level, which ignore art’s true nature: a process, always, of symbolization, and not a simulacrum of the reality contemplated. It is in the universe – for that matter abstract, neither narrative nor thematic – of this subtle and original sculptor from Minas and Goiás, Shirley Paes Leme, that a small yet true portion of Brazil can be found.
Click here to download the DOC archive with the full text
