RAFAEL CHAVEZ . JARDIM FLAMEJANTE: CRITICAL ESSAY BY WALTER ARCELA

 

In the searing noontime heat of Paraíba’s arid caatinga, four young people try to shield themselves from the sun beneath a leafless umbuzeiro tree. To create shade, they tie a sheet to its bare branches. The improvised shelter offers little relief, as the caatinga’s hot breath, rising from the sparse, thorny growth all around, presses in on them. It is in this environment that Rafael Chavez, alongside artists Yasmin Formiga, Água Yayu, and her sister Rafaella Marinho, begin firing ceramics in a handmade kiln built in the middle of the caatinga. The firing starts at midday so that by late afternoon, around six o’clock, the clay reaches the point at which the material hardens and acquires a sheen.

 

The kiln took four days to cool, and throughout those four days the mystery of whether the method would work hovered over Chavez’s anxious waiting. Ambient temperatures fluctuate between 35 and 38 degrees Celsius, which is nothing compared to the kiln’s internal temperature, reaching between 800 and 900 degrees Celsius – the ideal range for bisque firing. In this exposed, sun-scorched landscape, the heat that already feels stifling in daily life becomes almost irrelevant when measured against this other thermal scale. A new stage now emerges in the artist’s production, extending beyond the unprecedented experimentation with clay as a support material: fire, heat, and all that blazes become conditions of work, atmosphere, risk, and creation.

 

 

Constructing the kiln took a year. The artist built it entirely by hand. She dug the ground to the proper depth, shaped and sketched the form, and finally laid the bricks. The bricks that structure the kiln’s body come from mud formed along the edges of reservoirs after flooding. Water and earth are still united. Air fills the time of drying. Fire, later on, hardens the clay that will become structure. The construction of this technological artifact depends on a rudimentary convergence of all the natural elements. When the kiln was ready, Rafael entered it. She sat in the darkness, meditated, and asked the fire to lend her the strength of the stars. This symbolic gesture belongs to the realm of necessity. Harnessing fire requires knowledge of an ancient system – it demands passing through the material before using it. The kiln and the fire thus function as mediating devices between body, territory, and materiality. The desire to work with ceramics was not new. In 2023, at the invitation of curator Tereza de Arruda, the artist participated in the Jingdezhen International Ceramics Biennale in China, presenting pictorial works from her botijas series – paintings on ceramic vessels with pronounced textures and radiant illuminations. The visual exploration of volume in this series already foreshadowed the desire to move beyond two-dimensionality. Increasingly, the artist sought chromatic techniques that enhanced contours; building the kiln was therefore the culmination of a desire that had grown uncontrollable.

 

 

Chavez’s great-grandfather, Otávio Marinho, was a potter in the city of Santa Luzia, about 300 kilometers from the state capital. He manufactured tiles, and the artist recalls that “half the houses in the city were covered with his tiles.” At the time, protective equipment did not exist. Firings were daily, and prolonged, unprotected contact with fire and smoke gradually compromised his vision until he was left blind. This story, in fact, gave rise to the painting Retina Curada em Mel [Retina Cured in Honey], featured in the exhibition. The clay that once blinded and rendered vision opaque within a family now, through Chavez’s production, projects images and renews scenarios. Pottery returns as an ancestral form of knowledge, transmitted through the air, like an unconscious collective memory. Although there is no literal or direct connection between the artist’s techniques and those of her ancestor, the clay is the same, the entanglement with territory is the same, and, above all, so is the knowledge that emerges from her hands – from prolonged intimacy with matter and with the act of making itself.

 

To speak of ceramics today is to revisit ancestral knowledge. For a long time, pottery traditions were attributed primarily to Amazonian peoples and to inhabitants of the Atlantic Forest along the coast, overlooking the material archaeology of the peoples of the caatinga in Brazil’s Northeast. The country’s historical and prehistoric past, crystallized in Afro-Indigenous expression, is rich in ceramic use, encompassing a wide diversity of techniques for preparation, pastes, modeling, firing, and painting. With industrialization, many of these practices were abandoned, which makes Chavez’s gestures of reassembling and citing them, in free dialogue, so powerful. Each ceramic piece is finished using artisanal methods, preserving on its surface the record of the finger that modeled it, as in the traditions of the potters of Tracunhaém and Tacaratu in Pernambuco. The distinction between procedures considered craft and those considered contemporary art collapses when they encounter Chavez’s artistic practices, which dialogue without the slightest constraint with techniques, visualities, and themes once considered regional, whose high-voltage contemporaneity is inherent, beyond any need for validation.

 

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The Italian Renaissance painting tradition established painting as a window. Various canonical works emerged from this conception – a framing that organizes the world according to perspective, offering the gaze an ordered and stable space. In Chavez’s work, this logic appears displaced. Her paintings often present arrangements that suggest interior spaces, cavities, or even the idea of a house. The works maintain framing and cropping, and an awareness of the visual field, yet they are deeply interwoven with the horizon, making it impossible to differentiate internal from external and revealing that the formation of the work does not operate under a notion of environmental externality. Nego Bispo speaks of Western fear of nature and calls it cosmophobia – that is, a phobia of the cosmos. These paintings are not afraid of nature. On the contrary, they speak of an antidote to cosmophobia, a return to the original yearning for integration with the whole. They form an expository grammar of the ground, one that echoes aridity and mystery under an open sky. Territoriality is reinforced through mystification without resorting to archetypal obviousness. The works, mostly vertical, launch upward like tensioned trunks, connecting the telluric plane to the ethereal. There is in them a constant attempt to weld sky and ground, as if the form itself sought to align the human gaze along a broader, cosmic axis.

 

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In Rafael Chavez’s pictorial work, light assumes an almost corporeal intensity, complemented by the suggestion of volume. In thematic terms, stars do not signal distance but pulse as points of gravitation in a terrestrial sky. All of this is crossed by meltings, textures, and neon glows in an almost digital visuality, which is striking when we consider the archaeological memory of the caatinga present in some of the works. These presences of the landscape, translated into intensity, affirm a sensitive territory – a garden that scintillates across its own surfaces and succeeds in bringing sky and earth together as one.

 

 

CAPES Research Fellow in PPGAV/UFPE
Member of the Brazilian Association of Art Critics (ABCA)