About my painting
Tania Nitrini
September 2004

To write about my own painting is very anguishing, as it is not a rational thing. Therefore, any text feels artificial and distant. But I will accept the challenge.

Painting is a necessity, a desire born many years ago. I do not understand why I only allowed myself to realize it after such a long time! But I know that after I started painting, under professional orientation, there was no way out. I have a compulsion: painting. What do I do with it? That’s what I try to find out in facing the strongest anguish in my life.

I believe my painting is baroque, as I am baroque, as Brazil is baroque. If we believe that painting neither por either or classical, then I’m baroque by exclusion, because I am not classical. Mine is a baroque covered with a medieval wrap. I see myself suspicious, covered in a black shawl, entering a church, as in my adolescence. Later I delighted in science’s explanations of the origin of life and abandoned religion.

There are very strong expressionist elements in my painting . It’s instinctive and expresses my feelings. I’ve always been very curious about the things hidden in people’s minds and a great attraction for what bursts from the head when there is no inner space left. I had wanted to study psychiatry in medical school.

My art is very informal, imaginative, gestural and spontaneous. When I finally decided to study the fine arts, I was facing a crisis with the public health field. I used to love public health. When I fell in love with painting, I decided to stop practicing medicine. I like to paint simply devoting myself to painting. With no rules or any kind of barriers.

When I start to paint a picture I want intimacy. I don’t know what the painting will become, but in every one of them I leave on a trip. I even identify some stops along the way, like on a train ride. When I used to travel from Alexandria to Mossoró, on a train that no longer exists, I knew its final destination, but never what would happen … because there were transitory stops. I believe that in my painting ,the final stop will always be transitory. I can’t get enough of it. It’s just that life is much bigger than I am - and I want to be bigger than life. That’s where my desire lies.

Lyricism and provocation are in my poetics, as a result of life experience in the arid fields of northeast Brazil, my birthplace, as well as in the big city, where I have lived since I was 24.

The arid fields and the big city get confused in the interplay of lines and shadows, strong colors - when I sometimes abuse yellow and grey, and always red and black. Dry branches or complex urban lines are recurring elements that I use. These images involve me, and I become small in their junctures; it is frightening and promises enchantment, magic and adventure. A labyrinth of encounters and missed engagements with the human mind? Even though there are no human drawings in my paintings, they are present, in a very personal way.

The chromatic composition of my paintings is influenced by my northeastern origin. People say the art of the northeast art is very colorful because of the monochromatic landscape. Colored handmade dolls, carpets and dresses. The tropical soil of the burning sun makes me use pink, orange, yellow and red to excess. They represent the lyricism of dawn and twilight, the fearful midday sun.

In the big city, I became influenced by the "sea of heads" of a downtown street at any time of day, by the improvised homes under the bridges, by the sleeping bodies inside paper boxes - , tons of them, all over the sidewalks -, by the negligent exploitation of children on every street corner, by the beauty of the racial mixing, by the charm of buildings from different times and styles, by the boldness of the sky-scrapers, the colored lights flashing on the street signs and billboards, inviting people to embark on their dreams, by the multiplicity of dream options everywhere........

In the arid northeast or in the big city, everything exists in excess. There’s excess in life and excess in the lack of living. This excess overflows from my painting the product of much research. Studying my origins, I try to compensate for my absence from home, and try to seek inspiration from the indigenous women and African slaves, whose names are unknown, not recorded in our official history. I need to learn my own and my family’s history of the place where I was born, to try to rebuild an identity that incorporates elements hidden under the domination-based supremacy of the colonizer. It’s my rational side in service of my imaginary. That search motivates my study of painting and adds obsession to my work, which manifests through the poetics of color.


TEXTS:

"Siddhartha " - Enock Sacramento

"Colorful dialogue" - Luiz Fernando Câmara Vitral