“The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.”
Walter Benjamin
A lived event is finite. The remembered event is limitless, though, because it is a key to everything that came before and after. The stories of Etel Carmona, David Almeida, and Alberto da Veiga Guignard are interwoven at Casa Zalszupin through an affective and vernacular gaze and imbued by the architectural potentiality of the space. There, the landscapes they once lived, saw and recollected are unraveled through paintings, sculptures, and furniture that reconstruct the latent Brazilianness of the country's interior.
The landscape that inhabits the exhibited works is engendered even before the image itself is recognized by the mind. It awakens intimately and deeply until it attains a place to be formed outside our bodies, materializing before our eyes. This is also the poetic developed by the triad that occupies the different environments that make up the building, located in the heart of Jardim América, in São Paulo.
Etel Carmona's inspiration is born in the countryside and develops out of it. The nature that inhabits her inner world gains space and interpretations through her hands. The craft is her guide and the means by which she builds what surrounds her. A self-taught artist born in the interior of Minas Gerais, Etel found in wood her primordial raw material. Closely connected to the natural universe for over two decades, she works in harmony with sustainable management and attuned to the teachings of originary peoples. In this intimate coexistence with the earth, textures, shapes and joins are born, which she develops and implements with perfection. The iconography of deep Brazil permeates her work, from the impatiens flowers to the oxcart, always superimposed on dreamlike landscapes, scenes so admirably captured by Guignard and by David Almeida in the same regions.
Guignard liked to say that he "painted what he saw", but, like David, the vision he transformed into paint was always filtered through the lenses of imagination — an embodiment of the encounter between the pictorial and memory. The landscapes that live in David's imaginings and are part of this conversation first begin to reveal themselves as they are carved into found pieces of jatobá trees. Each part removed from the wood becomes a fragment and later is filled with darkened colors, which then effloresce into light and shadow. A large part of the series was produced in the interior of São Paulo, specifically in Pindamonhangaba, a city where Etel herself spent part of her adolescence. It was also there that David drew closer to landscape painting and where he found the possibilities that would lead him to explore this scenery in an art form. The subjectivity that characterizes his works is born from this place of memory, from the attempt to create a space of belonging and to confront painting from an affective frame of reference.
The fantastic floating landscapes through which Guignard made his name and are now interwoven in this narrative also sprang from affectivity. Figuration serves only as a support for the pure aesthetic emotion enfolded in his paintings. References from his visual field are given an ethereal touch, making us doubt whether such scenes could, in fact, exist. Although he is considered part of the second modernism, he traveled a unique path that was not closely tied to the artistic movements in Brazil at the time. So it was also with Jorge Zalszupin, who, with his sensual and modern architecture, kept his distance from fads, thereby creating a unique and recognizable style for his productions, including furniture.
A longtime friend of Etel Carmona, Zalszupin shared with her the love of craftsmanship, of nature and simplicity. It was natural, then, that pieces by his friend, as well as her processes, would organically find a fitting space in the ambiances of the house in which Zalszupin and his family lived for so many decades. It is the transmission of such a legacy that transforms mere existence into an experience. And it is in this way that such an experience is enhanced and strengthened, by uniting these vernacular tentacles of creativity.
ANA CAROLINA RALSTON
curator