Marcia Thompson explores the surface of the canvas
Marcia Thompson opens today her first solo show in São Paulo, at Casa Triângulo Gallery, with 16 paintings.
The artist from Rio de Janeiro belongs to a new generation of ex-students of Parque Lage Arts College - birthplace of 'Geração 80', but like a few of her colleagues she doesn't show any affinity with the pictorial exuberance of those years.
She pursues a certain economy of the painting, condensing it with elements of spacial and chromatic synthesis. She resumes and goes beyond some latent point in the passage of the Concretismo to the Neoconcretismo movement in Brazil, or in Oiticica's language: in between 'colour-perception' and 'colour-experience'.
Aiming to explore the perceptible qualities of the pictorial surface, the works create contrasts, thickening the paint in some points, and covering all the rest with a very thin layer of colour or even leaving the canvas visible. Sometimes the raw canvas is populated with points of paint squeezed from the tube.
This operation creates an optical game, that acts through the formation of points, full of pictorial matter, inside the visual field. The vibration of these points, with different chromatic intensities, builds up a retinal exercise that plays with the differentiated heights of the planes perceived by the gaze. It produces illusory presences and absences, due to its own vibratory nature, blink-blinking, of these points.
The works also lead you to a tactile convocation, a bodily confrontation against the specks or points of paint, as the pulses emitted from the chromatic vibration become real.
They are sent to the experimental component part of the colour and matter, introducing an internal temporality with the expansion of the work in the space. Lateral gazes and meshes of shadows enhance the correspondence between optic and tactile.
These operations became clearer during the course of the last three years, as exhibited in this show. In opposition to some more complex paintings, radical attempts gradually renounce any notion of form or graphic representation in the topographic confrontation of the dots, to reach an undifferentiated field, more regular, in white on white.
The shadowing effects highlight the chromatic mass, that sometimes bristles in points and sometimes spreads itself smoothly on a small canvas almost cubic, an almost-box, protruding from the wall. This monochromatic and sensitive mass resting over the canvas reminds us of the works of the german painter Jurgen Meyer, furthermore for the relevant variability in dimentions: minute works concentrate the actions, creating an inverse proportionality to the size.
Carlos Ucha Fagundes Jr
São Paulo, 1993.