Critics

The first time I came across Maria Thereza Negreiros art during the Teatro Amazonas centennial celebration, left me mesmerized. I was in front of an unrestrained overflowing talent and some of the strongest art produced by an Amazonian Artist. The second time, during a major overview at La Tertulia Museum of Modern Art in Cali, Colombia, was for me a subjugating experience. These personal feelings are the result of Maria Thereza Negreiros radical and committed art that fill the spirit with visceral audacity and amazement, which is a quality rather scarce among contemporary South American artists.

 

La Tertulia overview allows us to analyze in depth Maria Thereza s  work in the past and  present. Such should be the purpose of an overview and I must add that not every artist put up with an analysis of their work in time and space. María Thereza Negreiros not only holds up, but she  reasserts all the technical  and formal audacity of the 60´s,  leaving behind  the dense pigmented abstractionism of American painting at that time,  in an effort to diminish the political contents of Latin American art. In the 60´s and 70´s with the use of synthetic and plastic materials, María Thereza Negreiros reinvents artistic participation proposing an experimental work, with sculptural qualities of volume and sinuosity, honest and true meditation of the suffocating events we were experiencing in Latin America. At this very moment she encounters her guides and objectives, even though she never allowed her art to fall under the influence of political events. The proof to it is that we can still establish a communication, a dialogue with her art of the 60´s finding neither any anachronism nor obsolete aspects to it. On the contrary, her paintings have new connotations that new generations can identify and interpret without difficulty.  

 

Going over the sensuality of the 60´s we find a return to the abstractionist Project, in fact, a return into the Future, since we are in front of a new abstraction that the artist will name Sunflowers (Girasoles) and she will looked into the raison d être of each particularity, of the dream and the delirium, the representation of a sense of humor that would explode into colors. 

 

From Sunflowers (Girasoles), and without abandoning her abstract drive, María Thereza Negreiros, will find a geography, the one pertaining to her homeland, the fabulous and wounded Amazon.    It was for me the most shocking moment in this exhibition, especially being aware I was dealing with an artist with so much talent, in the peak of her creativity and strength.  The Blooming Forest (Selvas Florecidas), Igapós, and Fires (Incendios) contain and barely restrain the erupting volcano embodied in María Thereza Negreiros.

 

In the flowers that bring color to the forest, we see explosions, like premonitions to the unavoidable fire that will destroy and that the religious peace of  the Igapós will not be able to refrain. The Series Fires in the Amazonian Forest (Incendios en la Selva Amazonica) does not merely reproduce the crime that each day attacks and destroys the amazing forest, it is the vivid portrait of agony, with all its cruelty present in the tortured brushstrokes of deep green against aggressive reds. María Thereza Negreiros offers us the huge reality of destruction, where our emotions and our eye remain stranded and we feel condemned by our rigidity, our impossibility to act, and we feel suffocated by the ashes and the uselessness of gestures. There, amid vegetation and fire, there is no room for words, nevertheless there is no useless moaning, since Artist María Thereza Negreiros was raised by the river of deep waters and her artistic language will always bring poetry to death and destruction.

 

At first glance Negreiros paintings of the 1980 might be considered direct descendents of the Abstract Expressionists – the canvases consist of large areas of color, softly suffused around the edges in the manner of Rothko, and with the paint applied with great confidence and obvious enthusiasm. On closer reading these apparent abstractions are revealed as representations, dramatically vivid representations of forest fires. The aim of this paper is to use these relatively little-know works to raise some more general points about recent Latin American art.

 

Maria Thereza Negreiros series of paintings of the destruction of the Amazonian rainforest bring together number of issues which preoccupy contemporary Latin American artists. First there is the sense of place, the theme of the land invaded, transformed, destroyed, and more specifically, the theme of the tropical jungle, an image which a number of other Latin American artists have claimed back from the fantasy world of European artists like  Le Douanier Rousseau. Then there is her direct confrontation with the problem of modernism in Latin America, of how to use s language developed in New York, in a context utterly different from the one in which she worked, end yet be able to use it to say something coherent and honest. Her solution is exceptionally appropriate to her theme: the trees, usually very small and insignificant at the bottom of her large square canvases, appear to be sucked up into the atmosphere of head, smoke and gases and at the same time they are transformed into color and paint. Hers is a vision at once beautiful and terrifying, where modernist debate, where discussion of the merits of figuration or abstraction appears trivial.

 

Born in the Brazilian province of Amazonas in 1930, Negreiros moved to Cali in Colombia in her twenties. After a tentative series of explorations into different styles, typical of Latin American artists seeking a mode of expression witch they can feel at home, an extended in her Amazonian birthplace gave her the impetus to turn back to that most unquestionably Old World medium, oil on canvas, take the equally traditional theme of landscape, and produce something modern and Latin American. Abstract Expressionism was exported from the US to Latin American in the 1950 precisely because of its apparently apolitical character: it could evoke general, universal themes untainted by mundane reality; Maria Thereza Negreiros inversion could not be more powerful: the trees, the word, become an abstraction. Her art is unquestionably both political and of truly universal concern.

 

The artistic career of María Thereza Negreiros has been very consistent: always dynamic, a tireless investigator, ready with her stubborn capacity for work to reach the ultimate consequences. His work in all its stages is marked by constants: absolute dominance of color, very rich material and handling of a vigorous language of frank Americanity inseparable from the most demanding dictates of universal plastic. From all his aesthetic experiences his art has come out stronger and richer. The tendency to abstraction has progressively stripped it of concrete form.

 

If the painter and theoretician Maurice Denis is taken into account when he says: "We must remember that a painting, before being a battle horse, a nude woman or any anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors arranged in a certain order. And to Wilhem De Kooning when he notes that "what makes "action painting" is not that recognizable or non-recognizable images of the everyday world appear, but rather the way in which the brushstroke is exposed", the affirmative personality of María Thereza Negreiros will be better understood. that always faithful to his fiery and passionate temperament is beyond the consideration of whether his paintings are anecdotal, informal, abstract, lyrical or traditional.

 

The artist's palette has a very wide and lavish range. When you use blue the whole scale is present: Cobalt, Prussia, Céruleum, Saxony, Indigo, Ultramar. The same is the generosity in the gradation of green, yellow and red "...with certain colors I feel a great power in my hand." The painter allows herself to be guided by her sensitivity, nothing obeys a preconceived system.

María Thereza Negreiros starts working with photography in 1971. She searches irrevocable realistic images of eyes, teeth, mouth, to turn them into magic objects enlarging or duplicating them into a transparent photographic sheet. She insists on filling the objects (boxes, cubes, mobiles) with meanings that surpass the mere technical problem solving, without ever losing her goal: define and censure the subhuman nature of the space assigned to man. All María Thereza Negreiros experimental efforts are based on her concern to free the man and to elucidate the “condition problems of actual space”, according to her own words.

 

Maria Thereza Negreiros, a Brazilian painter living in Cali, Colombia, is one of the most disquieting young figures of today’s Colombian art. Disquieting is an ambiguous qualifier that needs to be more precise. I want to say that she works with the constant preoccupation of investigating shapes, materials, decisions about color, and composition.

 

Her work is a long multi-faceted inquiry that never loses sight of the fact that experiments do not permit distraction or losing track of the content.

 

Maria Thereza’s first concern was to mix the new views of technique of painting with the desire to interpret a Latin American reality. The problem was difficult; it separated, right at the beginning, any anecdotal solution of such a reality. Thus, Maria Thereza needed to define what her vision, her perception or her feeling about things American consisted of. She began, with Genesis scrutinizing the beginning of shapes and of things, with lacquers, resins, sands and new paints that distanced her from the luminous color of her first oils, and led her work into relief, into the third dimension. More figurative forms came from Genesis: not satisfied with painting a figure, she included it, in the shape of dolls, simple, crude, trivial, that became part of the painting. After that she discarded the figures that gave an excessively decorative expression to the painting, and discovered her own creatures, angels with extraordinary strength, implanted in the grotesque and the monumental.

 

These phenomenal and absurd creatures expressed themselves with unusual materials, worked with noted meticulousness. It was the moment of the deepest interpenetration between the material and the image; also the point at which experience left off being excessively evident, and the content imposed itself strongly. Over these periods, Maria Thereza Negreiros’ work developed like a human being, passing from infancy to adolescence, to maturity. A maturity full of power and now without the anguish of many issues within the new experimental zones of painting. It is notable that, being work full of deliberate intentions, it continues to be inflexibly organic. It doesn’t separate itself from its passion for life, nor does it lose this vitality. On the contrary, it nurtures itself with ever more daring solutions, with more daring materials. It bravely positions itself between truth and fiction, but doesn’t lose sight of the fact that any of its esthetic structures is born from passion, as well as a mental process of investigation.

 

I classified this work as disquieting for all of these reasons. Young artists usually establish themselves in a field discovered by others; it is easier and avoids the almost insurmountable effort to discover something new in the esthetic world, where something more original than what preceded it, is announced all the time. Young people accommodate themselves in categories, they rely on labels, and their greatest effort consists of modifying the appearances of something already known. Maria Thereza Negreiros is an unusual case of revolt against that way of working. She is beyond categories, systems and models. It is difficult to find someone who is more personal, more alert about her own processes, and more unsatisfied with them. She does nothing more than declare herself and improve herself; she doesn’t dwell upon her discoveries. It isn’t just about honesty and self-criticism. It’s more than that; its an unending obstinacy within the resolve to advance, sniff out, discover. As regards the process of the deterioration of all contemporary art, she suffers with all of the intensity that this entails in a particular manner. It’s possible that due to this exceptional quality of her work, this style will become stronger, and losing timidity, until the value of speaking and expressing oneself without circumlocution, becomes established.

 

Maria Thereza Negreiros, with her lyrical abstract expressionism, imposed herself immediately on appearing for the first time in Bogotá with her 1961 exhibition at the Luis Angel Arango Library. In spite of its note of fresh spontaneity, the series, Magic in the Mountain carried within it the unmistakable pictorial strength of the oils. The artist soon stood firm, and did so progressively, as one of the most magnificent personalities that emerged in the seventies. She passed through a period related to informality that culminated with the Genesis series, exhibited first in Bogotá and later at the Pan-American Union in Washington.

Later she moves from one discovery to another, each one conquered honestly, in constant exploration of new materials and their combination. She first experiments with doll heads as part of the pictures, (reminding one of pop art), later with layers made from plastic sheets, on wood. The human being becomes a central motive, but fragmented, showing only a pair of hands, a face, a female torso with voluptuous breasts, all in absolutely free configuration and daring combinations of luminous colors. Maria Thereza Negreiros is today one of the most expedient creators, the most inspired and most consistent within Colombian contemporary art.

 

1961 

 

Paisajes (Landscapes) derived from the images of the Amazon. A reconstruction of its origins and questioning of the forces of nature has been a recurring topic. Eyes, throats, screams, that seemed to belong to another cycle of different visual experiences, are also transmitted, regardless of their origins. Discover, inquire, and dive into the bottom of things, giving that activity a philosophical feeling that should finally explain the very existence of the visual image, has been the central dedication of Maria Thereza Negreiros.

 

Over the years, the intensity of this pursuit has never ebbed; she ran the risk of becoming entangled in her own epistemology, and that the visual force of her work would cool off as a consequence of that excessive intellectualism. But it was precisely the interior poetic violence, her personal and unquenchable combustion that prevented the occurrence of that cooling.

 

Thus, divided between rational experiment and lyrical communication, her work became more convulsive, less stationary than others, where an idea exists from the beginning, this idea is transferred to a convenient system of shapes, and the process of the work develops in only one canal, improving or modifying itself, always within its chosen limits. I wouldn’t say that Maria Thereza Negreiros’ experimental urge, has been, exactly, a passion for being in the forefront of a new image, and the use of different materials. I would say, instead, that this desire always had the same motivation; to say something important and profound that would widen the visual register of the public and allow it to enter a new imaginary territory.

 

Meter by meter, her work is now, effectively, a large territory. It bears her name but also her mark; warm, sensual, deeply disturbing, nonconformist.