FERNANDA GALVÃO . TWO MOONS: CURATED BY MARCOS MORAES
Two moons, or about dives… vermeil!
The paintings by Fernanda Galvão presented here invite the viewer into a dimension of parallel, distinct realities. Through the intricate play of color and form in concert with broad, fluid gestures, they open the way to dives, flights, deliriums, and daydreams.
Upon entering the exhibition space and moving among the paintings, the viewer is invited to submerge and resurface in an environment of new personal perceptions. The experiences Galvão offers are not definitive images of the world, but possible worlds born of her desire – and, why not, of ours as well – from our own impulses that may devour us or drive us to decipher these works in order to decipher ourselves.
For Fernanda Galvão, painting is, above all, an affirmation. Yet this does not imply any reluctance to experiment or to develop projects under different conditions. She stands within a lineage of women painters who seem endlessly able to challenge the often-proclaimed “deaths” of painting – those recurring declarations in an era shaped by editing and mixing processes, not only of images but of every form through which we experience the world. Galvão prefers to keep defying the debates entrenched within the field, surrendering herself – unashamedly and passionately – to whatever compels and stirs her as a possibility for image-making, and to plunge into painting itself.
Tracing her investigations and works over ten years, we discover defining aspects across her distinct bodies of work – aspects that cannot easily be gathered, listed, and reduced to a single paragraph here. Even so, a few are essential to note: her explicit fascination with color, evident from the outset in the hypnotic, destabilizing reds and pinks of her spatial experiments in 2015–16. In those early works, the blood pulses – vibrant, alive, erotic, and carnal. The audacious, intrepid colorist was already there, with her hallucinatory and hallucinogenic works that capture our gaze and don’t let it go.
An early fixation on the image of the body – or rather, on the materiality of that fragmented body that dissolves, fuses, and transforms – marks another distinct moment in Galvão’s trajectory. It allows us to perceive a gradual shift in the gaze, which spurs a metamorphosis into other bodies: those of the vegetal and mineral worlds, though never overtly.
From the outset, her work has evinced an interest in many and diverse “bodies.” This broad universe of desire for images led to eruptions of the anatomical and the organic, which more recently have revealed a vulnerability of the forms, contrasted and unsettled by the saturation of color, by the intensity of contrasts, and by luminous presences that shimmer and insinuate themselves among them.
Many distinct layers of reference and temporality weave a dense tangle that runs through Galvão’s work. Among them are declared and assumed relations with nature, as well as with landscape and the inner world – connections that could span a wide spectrum from Manet to Rothko. These threads form only a guiding line, crossed by science fiction filtered through the ideas of Ursula K. Le Guin, by allusions to poetry, dreams and surrealism, by fabulation, atlases and maps, botany and herbariums, and many other possible ways of representing and encoding nature.
A crucial key to Galvão’s painting lies in understanding her reasoning, which begins from “landscapes” – and memories of them – stored in her mind. In this sense, the experience of travel becomes another important aspect of her work, as one glimpses images that evoke distant and distinct contexts: from São Paulo to the California desert (Joshua Tree National Park), from Paris to Catalonia – to mention only those places where living becomes a way of experiencing and coexisting with nature and landscape.
Though remnants of the images she created in the various studios she has worked in during her travels seem to linger, her canvases also retain the indelible marks of landscape painting and its “inanimate” beings – sometimes linked to an aqueous, humid environment and an organicity that suggest a personal ecosystem inhabited by forms overflowing into visuality. They do not seek to represent or describe – though that boundary can be blurred – but rather to convey the oneiric and singular visual world she proposes.
In Cobra-árvore, certain remnants remain – one might describe them as memories of her passages through distinct landscapes. Here we already sense a suggestion of vertical vegetation breaking the horizontality that had dominated her earlier works. A hint of diverse plants traverses the atmosphere, and we cannot help but stare at it, yearning to dive into the deep blues that, like a backdrop, define the pictorial space. Galvão reaffirms her singular ability to render figurations – abstract, ambiguous, and amorphous forms – with refined precision.
From this point on – namely, in the paintings that follow – the surfaces expand in scale and are overtaken by colors that grow more complex and varied. There is a marked presence of intoxicating vermeils, deepened by wine and burgundy tones that she tangles, braids, and weaves in color upon the fabric’s weave. Her intensified use of light and shadow replaces the tonal variation more characteristic of earlier works. The sense of energy, vigor, and impetuosity in the images is heightened by the mixing of materials and textures, the increased layering of colors, the addition of glitter, and the use of shimmering dry pastel, which she experiments with in paintings of saturated intensity.
Particularly with the color palettes of Duas luas, Lua Mamão, Serpente Redemoinho, Mamão do fundo-do-mar, and even the distinct Ovo de Peixe, the interplay of elements becomes markedly present and assertive. It creates an atmosphere in which internal, psychological, and fantastic landscapes – almost theatrical in their staging – build a density charged with emotional and artistic intensity.
This body of work affirms the current moment of poetic exuberance in Galvão’s painting, which has become at once more complex and more unrestrained – more open to the unexpected, in the artist’s words. She still sees these paintings as “stronger, more energetic, with a different vibration of color, and with backgrounds that assert themselves as characters,” referring to her earlier production. For her, there is now less emphasis on the visible line, which – like the cataloguing of elements – no longer marks and isolates each image. Instead, they soften, dissolving more easily – gliding or plunging into depths – and become immersed in the atmosphere and tension generated by the poles of force and energy Galvão establishes in each canvas.
At the same time, Galvão has begun to explore with greater frequency and intensity one of her defining traits: the fusion of spaces – earth and sea with sky and infinity – where one image metamorphoses into another, confidently dissolving boundaries, even if only partially, and forming interior landscapes of other dimensions. It becomes nearly impossible to tell whether the objects are resting on the ground, lying at the bottom of the sea, or floating in the air. References to three other works – Alface Noturna, Olhinhos Noturnos, and Onda (Yellow Force) – reinforce this line of thought, as they explore new relationships of form and color while still favoring high contrast.
An apparent contradiction between titles and images could be interpreted – or understood – as a continuation of the high-contrast process Galvão has adopted as her working method: a proposition like a playful, fantastical game between them and the forms – sometimes perverse, like lingering traces of plant references. No longer the carnivorous ones that once fascinated her, they now appear as devourers and consumers of color instead of bodies or souls, as in the realm of science fiction. Swallowed and revived, the colors are regurgitated – stronger and more imposing.
Through changes in the density of objects cast into this undefined space – where the horizon is perpetually replaced by a continuous, fluid treatment of space – ambiguity deepens as the objects acquire meanings other than those the eye might expect from the forms that emerge. Subverted, they assume new statuses, new configurations, within a world more internally cohesive. A world? A galaxy – or even the universe….
