Alban Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition Mãe da Lua by Adriana Coppio, her first solo show with the gallery. This is also the first exhibition of the São Paulo-born artist (born in Taubaté, in 1978) in Bahia. Mãe da Lua, title of one of the canvases, gathers around 30 of Coppio's works, paintings and drawings, highlighting the depth of her aesthetic and thematic repertoire, throughout an artistic career of more than two decades.
Part of a generation of artists congregated in São Paulo in the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s, Adriana Coppio's painting production soon attracted the attention of her peers and the contemporary art circuit, mainly because her works went in the opposite direction of the trends and currents of that time. Whereas the art scenario seemed to connect a bit more with abstraction and with productions of conceptual and/or performing character, Coppio established her interest in figurative painting since the beginning, a territory explored in her works until now.
Coppio opting for figurative painting, however, does not decrease the strength with which the artist makes such choice. At first sight, it's natural for the spectator placed in front one of her paintings to be taken by a kind of torpor or uneasiness in face of the landscapes, beings and places created by the artist. Since the beginning of her artistic production, Adriana Coppio has presented and led us to a Brazil – and beyond it – that takes us back to the canon of our modern painting, for example.
Her landscapes and spaces (rural and domestic, usually) are inhabited by hybrid figures (among humans, inanimate objects that seem to be alive, such as old dolls and, still, other beings that cannot be immediately and quickly classified). If modernity was responsible for giving us painting productions by brilliant artists like Guignard, Di Cavalcanti, Maria Martins – among other essential names – Coppio searches relentlessly for skies of caustic shades, uncertain and even imprecise.
If some time ago, the tropical luminosity worked as a leitmotiv for different paintings and works of varied names, in Adriana Coppio's work we see a Brazil on the opposite side of the archetypal and saturated representation that has been presented until now. In the words of the curator José Augusto Ribeiro, author of the critical essay that accompanies this exhibition:
"Starting by a fluorescent and artificial luminosity that invades the space of the canvases, comes from behind the figures and intrudes little by little through the interstices, the painting motifs, until it arrives, sometimes solid, flat at the very first plan [...]. This psychedelic light that permeates Coppio's images arises from the way the artist prepares her canvases to create her work, through the homogeneous filling of the "background" that seals the cloth thread, with yellow, green or pink acrylic paint."
From Ribeiro's words, we may highlight also the artist's pictorial process, whose canvases are made with acrylic paint, notably a less malleable material and that allows few (or almost none) negotiation between the artist and their work during the act of painting. Pigment of quick drying, the acrylic paint appears here, in Coppio's paintings, with impressive fluidity, sliding on the canvas in vast brushstrokes, typical of those who use oil paint in their canvases. Such virtuosity stands out in the artist's works; even it is only one aspect of her singular and well-known visual production.
It's also impressive that her references, coming from distinct natures, conjugate different universes in the canvas's plan. From the movies by David Lynch to the Brazilian folk books, from her experience in the field since the beginning of her life to the mysticism of literary works such as "The Red Book", by the Swiss Carl Jung, father of the analytical psychology. This way, Coppio invites us to go through her exhibition as if we were watching a movie, frame by frame, even if escaping the idea of a closed, hermetic narrative.
Whenever I start a work I have to really concentrate closing myself in the atelier and accessing what makes me want to be an artist, which is the material that encompasses my entire repertoire of interests found until now. As a starting point I use images of the things that interest me and work as a bridge or tool for what is on my mind. They can be a variety of photos, from my family or some that I took myself to capture something that surprises and instigates me and that I want to take with me somehow, references of movies or illustrations of books that are precious and inspiring to me, some since my childhood. In short, I make a big jigsaw of images, start to observe and investigate them incessantly in order to see all of them together and build a kind of mental collage which is, in itself, the beginning of the paintings' construction", says the artist.
Adriana Coppio –Mãe da Lua Alban Galeria – Rua Opening: Hours: Press contact: Critical essay by: José Augusto Ribeiro