Press Release
The Roberto Alban Art Gallery is pleased to announce for the first time an exhibition of the artist Célia Euvaldo (São Paulo, 1955), also her first solo show in Bahia. The artist, widely known for her black and white paintings, produced over three decades, presents a new set of works in which she explores the presence of color, continuing the research she started in 2016.
Since the mid-1980s, Célia Euvaldo has investigated, mainly in the field of painting, the relationships between gesture and matter. Her large canvases explore the multiple possibilities of the relationship between the white and the black, a work marked by a richness of textures, nuances and gestures.
Painter and designer, Célia Euvaldo marks an important period of the Brazilian contemporary art, participating in exhibitions like the 7 th Cuenca’s International Painting Biennial, in Ecuador, in 2001 and the 5 th Mercosul Biennial, in Porto Alegre, in 2005 and carrying out solo shows in institutions such as the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brancos, in 2006, Instituto Tomie Ohtake in 2013, among others. In the international ambit, the artist participated in the group exhibition Cut, Folded, Pressed & Other Actions at the David Zwirner Gallery, in New York, in 2016.
The physical dimension of the artist’s body in the production of her works is one of the key aspects for the comprehension of her artistic production. Her canvases are strongly marked by the relationship between her body and the scale of the painting, revealing – in unsuspected and even surprising layers – the presence of the gesture as a fundamental driving force in her creation process.
"One aspect of my work is the presence of the gesture. But I don’t refer to the expressive, impulsive gesture, of emotional release. It’s the gesture in itself, or better, the effort, the energy of the gesture. For this, the large dimensions are essential. It comes from my oldest works, 30 years ago", says the artist.
Since 2016, Célia Euvaldo has dedicated herself to a new investigation in her vast pictorial production, producing a body of work with the presence of open colors, such as red, orange and purple. The works gathered for her first exhibition at the Roberto Alban Art Gallery point, precisely, to this moment of rupture and renewal in her work. These are paintings that establish, therefore, a harmonious relationship between the usual b&w and a new color palette – canvases that combine the black in its usual thick textures, from the robust use of the oil paint, to colorful sections produced with more diluted paint, in more discreet shades of gray or in strong shades of orange, blue and variations.
"In all the paintings I leave a part of the canvas blank. I do this because I see these two matters as "things", ‘bodies", something almost sculptural. If I covered the entire canvas, these "things" would become areas, and I don’t want that. I want this weight and materiality of thing", adds the artist.
The text of the historian and art critic Ronaldo Brito also reflects on this new phase of Célia Euvaldo’s research: "In my view, (…) the vibrant colors emerge as extra factors of irritation and questioning in a painting that operates in an exiguous area and takes its force from winning over, repeatedly, the threatening entropy. The substantive question becomes the following: how do these chromatic contrasts, sometimes glaring, act in a pictorial space that until then was resumed to the massif invasions of the black over the white, to renegotiate the limits between the shape and the shapeless? As it occurs with the ivory black, the open colors don’t distillate a painting chemistry, engaged in revealing the unique identity of this purple, of this orange or that blue. They irrupt in the canvas, resolute, instinctively mixed and diluted."