The Role of the Image I
Marcos Chaves, Carla Guagliardi and Marcia Thompson
Although the three artists are from the same generation, neighbourhood and background, and are also friends, the concepts and media of their works are quite diverse and the show intends to explore this balance between Marcos CHAVES’ photographs, Carla GUAGLIARDI’s sculptures and Marcia THOMPSON’s objects..
Marcia Thompson is a Brazilian artist who lives and works in London and has a good track record of international exhibitions. Thompson’s work occupies the gallery space creating an expanded field, so that even a small work can impregnate the space it is surrounded by. The work is more like a happening. However, the artist uses conventional artistic materials such as paint, drawing notebooks, paper, graphite but in a totally unconventional way. She uses paint in a 3 dimensional way, makes pencil drawings on lined paper that look like objects when hanging on the walls, and turns cheap printed daily newspaper into precious little objects not by taking note of their words but using the ink on paper as colour patches. She interferes with subtle actions subverting normality, both in the objects and the way they are exhibited..
Thompson’s boxes of colour are imbued with the spirit of constructivism thus achieving purity in art and its essence. Pure primary colours, reds, blues and yellows, are re-interpreted via neo- concrete ’carioca’ experimentalism, which she says that she absorbed in an almost unconscious way. Her oil paintings are not flat, but 3 dimensional, and represent nothing. They sit in the borders between painting and objects, in black, white and sometimes in strong primary colour. There is always something of an act, a gesture, a labouring work, a physical doing in Thompson’s works: cutting, drawing, collating, filing, adding, plastering. She needs to be mentally and physically engaged with the work..
Her Bloquinhos/Small notepads, are these just simple and basic notepad leaves with subtle touches by the artist. She uses the most ordinary pieces of paper one can find, and then subverts the geometry of the lines by filling the gaps with other lines or erasing and blurring the lines - playing around with the stablished order and claiming our attention to discreet details of the work. They are also displayed in a playful way, as if exploring with the geometry of chance. Thompson picks out the individual holes already left there on top of the page by the notepad spiral and rearranges the way in which they hang on and the way we see the lines; creating a new disposition for the page in space, on the wall and in our lives. What if the horizon line is no longer where we are used to see it?.
As she fill out or erases spaces between the printed lines of the stationery she is leaving her traces. Her work is like a whisper - you got to listen to it very closely. She plays with music sheets, space is silence but the music in in our minds. In a world absolutely saturated by images her little pieces of paper nailed to the wall offer us a chance to be, they are little philosophical remarks reminding us of our own status as sublime creatures capable of creating beauty, and that art is precious even if made of little nothings.
Paula Terra-Neale
London, 2017.