Siddhartha
Enock Sacramento
Member of the Brazilian Association of Art Critics

"I have already left where I am". This verse from Manoel de Barros, the poet from Mato Grosso, recalls Fernando Pessoa’s, Pobre Velha Música (Poor Old Music) where he records an old song that transports a happy memory into the present. The world of imagination in Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha and the works of the painter Tania Nitrini, also fit into this intellectual and emotional climate. Ideas about essence and being, being and non being, and the polarity from which light can come, are developed there.

Tania Nitrini was born in the sertão of the Northeast. As a child she lived in Alexandria and José da Penha. As an adolescent, she moved to Mossoró, a town in the state of Rio Grande do Norte. After studying medicine in Fortaleza, she moved to São Paulo, where she specialized in public heath, worked as a public health physician and then opted for the visual arts, an old dream born of living alongside the colors of the handcrafts from her place of origin. The colored images of the cloth dolls, the patchwork quilts, the embroidery, the saints and altars from the region of her birth never left her mind. "This passion for colors led me to painting, "says the artist, who today creates from her own atelier in Pinheiros in São Paulo.

Tania has taken various paths, routes and short cuts through the visual arts. For a time, she recreated human figures - introverted, extroverted, enigmatic, tense, relaxed, with bright expressionist colors that recall varied states of being. This was perhaps a way to further her knowledge the human form that she had studied systematically at the university.

About three years ago, Tania began a series of paintings whose center is not human beings as such, but their surroundings, the cities they have built and inhabit. Among them, metropolises, such as São Paulo, with its whirlwind pace and stunning complexity. In these Tania Nitrini captured the vigorous image of metal structures and concrete, the nervous circulation of vehicles, their movements, transits and flow. This phase, included in part of this exhibit, is characterized by the use of powerful, interlaced forms and by a profusion of colors, most of them flat. They call to mind the cities’ large commercial galleries, the road system with its intersections and traffic signals, streets, avenues and overpasses.

Still, Tania Nitrini’s most recent paintings seem to signal a new direction in her work. As usual, with no loss of energy from her earlier phase, the artist’s eye scrutinizes the elements of urban landscape, recreating windows, bricks and other materials. Forms are diluted, the colors mature. In creating her work, Tania starts from the real, and in the end transforms it into another reality. Here, the intersection of streets, is and isn’t, a street intersection. The pedaling cyclist is - and is not - pedaling. Because on her canvas both become works of art. The enchantment of Tania Nitrini’s painting lies in this lack of certainties and precision: her poetics materialize there. To arrive at this juncture, Tania has taken various routes and has been many places. John Lennon, in reflecting on this, once concluded that he had been in many places, but only discovered himself within.


TEXTS:

"Colorful dialogue" - Luiz Fernando Câmara Vitral

"About my painting" - Tania Nitrini