From linen to voile

Before reaching the painting, Yasmin Guimarães began her research in the field of conceptual photography and experienced with instalative objects. In one of her photographs, Yasmin superimposed a tape on the horizon line, creating another scale to the landscape and at the same time removing the notion of depth. There was already the search to stagger the space and eliminate the perspective bringing the image to the plane. Being conscious or not this already indicates an intention to painting, as it’s similar to the process that academic painters suffered after the invention of photography. A chock in the representation of landscape was created, and the painting had to search for other artifices and intentions as it was surpassed in that context.

Shortly after this experience Yasmin starts her painting studies, first painting on paper and then working with small format linens. Her works cling to the plane, at times evidences of a landscape emerges, but still with ink stains, without the artifice of the line and the vanishing point as an illusion and depth instrument. This feature is inherited from the group of abstract expressionist artists, which together with the theoretical Clement Greenberg praised the picture plane as its own unique characteristic, thus differing up photography, sculpture and architectural design. However this was a separatist definition, that sparked controversy and limited the painting to a certain range of possibilities, which is a support already so old and so exploited. But as Greenberg himself writes in his text 1960’s Modernist Painting: “Art, among other things, is continuity.”

In the works presented in this exhibition Yasmin develops her process of thinking the making of painting and the deployments that it can achieve. Mostly abstract, using oil paint, spots, brushstrokes, blurred pastel colors, compose the space delimited by the chassis as if translating interfaces and sensations of an imaginary landscape, sometimes as a suggestion, and sometimes abstractly. She uses soft colors, purity, tranquility, without disturbing motifs, as a mental soothing for anyone. When asked about the use of strong, intense colors, she replied, “it’s a shout I didn’t want.” But what surprises us at times is the use of apparent raw canvas, showing us the truth of the support, of what is behind the painting, the freedom to deposit the paint only on the edges and on the corners leaving the bare canvas as the central theme. And in this sense, she went so deep that she started using a stretched voile fabric on the chassis, whose transparency reveals what is behind the canvas. Then, she proceeds to paint without using paint, with only voile and silk paper, creating fields of unshaped and subtle colors. This shows us the possibility of expanding the limits of thinking and doing painting, shows the artist’s freedom to transcend the support, regardless of the intention to create an imaginary or na abstract landscape.

Therefore, on the set of works presented here by the artist, whether making painting in its traditional support or not, what she does is to create her own poetic, a poetic that translates feelings, sensations, lightness, and perhaps a way to bear the conflicts of a society, to order chaos, an order whose measure is the instinct itself.