São Paulo, Brasil
26/10/2017 - 30/11/2017

In addition to the discussion on concrete and neoconcrete, Brazilian art from the 1950s provides sophisticated material for the study of the overlap between art and philosophy. Although in the various layers of a work the emphasis on form may stand out, conceptual thinking, whether turned to metaphysics, or ethics, or to the sensitive form itself, is the basis of artistic making.

Maria Leontina's art is one of the most striking examples of the philosophical framework of Brazilian constructivism and, refractory to the quarrel between paulistas and cariocas that occupied so many pages of our art historiography, it has only recently been receiving theoretical studies that overcome the limitations of the geopolitics of criticism of art.

Alternating his geographical base between São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Leontina conducted a coherent formal research that reached geometric abstraction around 1955, for conceptual necessity: thinking about the nature of time, this reader of Saint Augustine used mathematical forms to lead us to the questioning of Book XI of the Confessions: “What is time? If nobody asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to anyone who asks me the question, I don't know it anymore. ”

The exhibition at Dan Galeria, which marks the centenary of the birth of Maria Leontina (1917-1984), covers the enigma of time that the artist has investigated since at least 1954, and which would also motivate a large part of the production of other Brazilian artists in the construction field. , such as the Book of Creation (1959) and the Neoconcrete Ballet (1958) by Lygia Pape or the color-time by Hélio Oiticica (1959).

Before including geometric abstraction in his formal vocabulary, Leontina produced in the 1940s portraits that combine the expressionist trait with serenity. Despite the vigor of the brushstrokes and the dark lines marking outlines, the figures emanate the peace of those who savor the slow flow of time, with low eyes and relaxed eyelids. The palette of light blues and whites soothes the earthy tones even when they reach red, indicating that expressiveness can do without anguish and that stillness is not synonymous with melancholy.

The temporality that permeates the artist's personality and work is a striking feature of both the portraits and the subsequent production, as well articulated by Venâncio Filho, a temporality that suggests “a long and unhurried solipsism, determined by a kind of lucid reverie”, "A time that flows, almost imperceptible, almost immobile." The time in the portraits is not the time of movement, but the inner time of stillness.

The still lifes of the late 1940s contrast with the smooth stability of the portraits. They evoke Cézanne and the imminence of movement on the table tops that lean towards the plane of the canvas, as if pouring apples out of the picture. Prismatic planes mix figure and background, with diagonal lines leading the eye across the screen. With a conscious effort to stop the movement of the eyes, the spectator manages to stop in one of the several sets of bottles, isolated serene, as if the space of Cézanne received compositions by Morandi splashed. On the whole unstable, Leontina places the dense Morandian silence.

Still in the first figurative phase, Leontina paints a series of Sant'Anas reading with the girl Maria. Defying iconology, there is a great temptation to imagine that in these paintings the grandmother of Christ is showing images, not letters, to her daughter. Leontina collected images of Sant'Ana and as noted by Herkenhoff in the saint's paintings both planar games and the theme of reading announce the future series “Pages that, as we will argue, is part of a sequence of works on the perception of time.

Sant'Ana's paintings teaching Maria to read also point to a sense of motherhood as continuity, the passage of experiences into the future, in a drain of time that makes the present (and art) transmit to the future. The theme of the passage of time is one of the possible readings that this exhibition presents us with works from the phases "Games and Enigmas" (started around 1954), "From Landscape and Time", "Episodes", "Scenes", " Narratives ”(all started concurrently around 1956),“ Banners ”(started in the 1960s) and the aforementioned“ Pages ”of the 1970s, which is also the decade of the“ Umbrals / Altares ”and“ The Kingdoms and the Robes ”. The titles conferred by the artist to her series indicate the interest in passing through the moments, either in the form of the narrative (scenes, episodes, pages), or in the ontological mysteries of time (games, puzzles), in the relationship between time and spirituality (umbrals / altars, kingdoms and robes), or in time as a physical and social movement (standards).

In St. Augustine's Confessions the puzzle of time is investigated from the impossibility that something that does not exist can be present. We feel in a way that there are three times – past, present and future – but how can the past exist if it is no longer? How can the future exist if it is not yet? What is the gift, if it soon ceases to be? These questions must have occupied Leontina's days in her studio. Surrounded by books, figures of baroque saints, ex-votos, works by artists he admired and a reproduction of Ucello, Leontina developed a disciplined practice that left us thousands of compositions as indexes of the time of creative introspection.

Leontina had workshops in her homes in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, always taking care to keep her work space separate from the studio of Milton Dacosta, her husband. At a time when the art system in Brazil was beginning to establish itself and the art market was incipient, the artists' experience in their studios certainly differed greatly from the entrepreneurial rhythm of the contemporary artist, even in the case of an artist like Maria Leontina, who participated in several editions of the São Paulo Biennial (I, III, IV, V, VI, VII, IX), of the XXVI edition of the Venice Biennale, of the Panorama of MAM (I and II editions), of the exhibition Projeto Construtivo Brasileiro na Arte, just to name a few of the dozens of individual and collective exhibits from which the critical fortune around his work was constituted, with texts by the great names of Brazilian art critic, such as Sergio Milliet, Lourival Gomes Machado, Mario Pedrosa, Frederico de Morais, Ferreira Gullar, Lélia Coelho Frota, Ferreira Gullar, among others.

And here, in this brief list of important episodes in Leontina's career, we realize how illusory it is to try to reconstruct a story from isolated fragments of a life. Time is not made up of separate moments linked together in a timeline. Time is a drain, a continuous duration from one moment to the next, as articulated by Henri Bergson, a philosopher explicitly quoted in texts by Hélio Oiticica and who was certainly in Ferreira Gullar's repertoire when the Neoconcrete manifesto mentions the flow of time in poetry: “It is not, of course, a question of returning to the concept of time in discursive poetry, because while in this language language flows in succession, in neoconcrete poetry language opens up in duration.”

For Henri Bergson, "to last" is to go through changes in continuous states. Everything that has a psychological existence has duration, that is, it is continually transformed into an endless flow that in no way resembles a juxtaposition of fixed states, the preferred way in which our intellect tries to understand the movement of change.

The duration is a flow, one state ending in the other. The understanding has difficulty in dealing with the continuity that builds change, but Bergson points out that the human being is endowed not only with intellect but also with intuition, the ability we have to understand that duration is the “very fabric of which reality is done ”. Certainly here Bergson's theory of time deviates from Augustine's philosophy, for whom time is one of the divine creations, and thus cannot encompass the whole of reality, as it exists alongside other divine creations. In Bergson, the duration is the “continuous elaboration of the absolutely new”, an idea inconceivable for the fourth century theologian, for whom all creation comes from God.

When we think about time as “the fabric of which reality is made”, we can visualize a veil containing all the possibilities of reality, a “whole” containing all possible times individually experienced. The idea of the relationship between the whole and parts that are simultaneously autonomous and also constituting the whole is the basic structure of the compositions of the series “Os Jogos e enigmas”. Like a fabric of intricate, connected and autonomous parts, these paintings are made of blocks of simultaneities. In place of the timeline, of linear succession, there is a “plane of time”, with geometric events linked both on the axis of height and on the axis of width of the canvas.

A separate background is perceived in the composition, as a neutral base over which a myriad of combinations of rectangles, triangles and, more rarely, circles parade. In the 1954 compositions of this series, it is still possible to identify human figures crossed by this veil of geometric events, as if they were transparent beings undergoing possibilities of self-constitution.

In “Da Paisagem e do Tempo” there is no longer this figurative suggestion, and the composition is organized around a horizontal line that from time to time is fragmented without affecting the continuity of the flow of forms. It is as if the compositions of this series were horizontal extracts, isolated tracks from that whole of “The games and enigmas”, that is, one of the possible combinations of parts of the whole.

Sometimes the compositions of these series have a machinic and playful character, especially when circular shapes predominate. Time is then reinforced by the sensation of imminent movement, of pulleys that rotate and activate an apparatus. This is how the screens in the “Narratives” series work, propelling the passage from one rectangle to another with circular shapes.

It is interesting to note that in The Creative Evolution, Bergson dedicates a chapter to “the cinematographic mechanism of thought and the mechanistic illusion.” The cinematograph creates an illusion of movement by quickly juxtaposing static images. We understand time more easily by juxtaposing moments, as a juxtaposition of isolated scenes. “Perception, intellection, language generally do this. Whether it's thinking about what to do, whether to express it, or even to perceive it, we really do nothing but trigger a kind of inner cinematograph. ” Paradoxically, we think of duration, which is moving, through still images.

The “Episodes” series verticalizes the succession of geometric events, as in a film, with isolated frames succeeding in a dynamic stack that does not threaten to collapse, but rather passes from top to bottom or vice versa. In some works of this series there is only one vertical block with its interior events. In other paintings also entitled “Episodes”, the vertical bands follow each other side by side. Still, they differ from “Of Landscapes and Time” in that they highlight the vertical sections more than the horizontal central line.

The “Scenes” further isolate a part of the complex fabric of “The Games and the Enigmas”. They float in a void, plot their pulleys and refer us to the chapter of kinetic art in Latin American constructivism, with Abraham Palatnik, Soto, Cruz-Diez and Le Parc. However, Leontina is not interested in kineticism that affects the body, but in a certain “movement of the soul”, in the mobilization of the intellect towards metaphysical thinking.

If concrete art assumes the use of basic elements of painting, such as line and color, Leontina's art assumes the basic elements of life: space and time. Mobility then insinuates itself in these compositions more linked to spirituality than to the body.

In the 1960s, the series “Forms” refers more to Plato's theory of forms than to the constructivist form. They pulse like pure essences of the things of the world. The pastel prevents precise edges, gives smoothness, suggests a soft texture, a fluctuation of clouds of color, which then flutter like cloths in the “Banners”, mixtures of flag and shroud.

The spiritual kineticism proposed by Leontina in “Estandartes” refers to the artist's work as an advisor in the plastic arts section of the Franco da Rocha Psychiatric Hospital, Juqueri, in 1950, which resulted in an exhibition of interns' works at MAM-SP in the year Following.

The search for form innovation through contact with other logics – the madman, the child, or the non-Eurocentric episteme – is an important chapter in the history of modern art, from Picasso to Dubuffet, including in Brazil artists like Almir Mavignier, Lygia Clark and Maria Leontina, in addition to research by Nise da Silveira and Lula Wanderley.

As already pointed out by Paulo Herkenhoff and Paulo Venâncio Filho, it is possible to read Leontina's standards in parallel with productions by Arthur Bispo do Rosário from the idea of clothes to access other dimensions. Spirituality and alternative logic to the standard psychic functioning of the hyper-productive time are mutually revealing. In these two puzzles are themes such as the passage, the dimensions, the temporalities, the lighting, the lighting.

The standards refer to cloths but also suggest membranes and portals. In some, the circular center is luminous, deeper in the spatial illusion of the canvas. Stained glass windows from the late 1960s corroborate the importance of light and passage, explicit in the series “Umbrais / Altares”.

Were the Orantes ”back to the figuration of the 1960s composing the thoughts for the blank“ Pages ”? Are they a return of the 1950s Sant'Anas teaching the next generation to read the world? One of the prayers of 1966 looks at a flower with extreme attention. Time passes and the gaze remains fixed, seeking the explanation of the enigma.

After all, what is the difference between knowledge and spirituality?

Paula Braga, 2017