Thalita Hamaoui – Baile
Victor Gorgulho
Everything in nature dances. Despite constantly mimicking a static aspect, as if resting in complete placidity and silence, the entire natural ecosystem vibrates, incessantly, in a fascinating and endless myriad of internal and external processes invisible to the human eye. This kind of exuberant and ephemeral phenomenon performed by nature is what seems to reside in the core of each one of Thalita Hamaoui’s paintings.
Alban Gallery has the pleasure to announce the first solo show of the São Paulo-born artist, occupying the exhibition space with around fifteen new works made in the last two years. Exponent of a generation of artists whose production in painting has acquired relevance in São Paulo’s scene as well as in the entire country, Hamaoui is the author of a pictorial production marked by a singular approach to the landscape theme, attributing an expressive contemporaneity to a universe largely worked and discussed throughout the centuries; irrefutable presence in the diverse narratives of the history of art, western and beyond.
If the color pallet of Hamaoui’s paintings is somewhat varied – migrating from the high temperatures of the reds, yellows and vibrant greens to the gentleness of the multiple variations of the white, gray, black and such – also diverse is the quality and register of the brushstrokes that generate the artist’s paintings. When seen collectively, gathered in the exhibition space, they lend one another unsuspected sweeping force, overflowing color, vibe and movement in the spectator’s eye. When enjoyed individually, however, they subtly reveal their multiple layers and procedures used by the artist in their making, through a variety of uses of different kinds of brushes, oil paint, oily batons and, eventually, of acrylic paint, plaster and fabrics, in some of the works.
The title of the show Baile (Ball), has not only a visual, fable-like connotation, but also a metalinguistic nature, while it refers to this kind of nature’s dance that the artist tries to capture and immortalize on the surface of her canvases, it also points to Hamaoui’s painting process itself. Working simultaneously in different pieces, the artist sets a work flow, at the same time organic and intuitive, moving around the space of her studio painting simultaneously in different canvases, that end up been contaminated by elements, figures and even by an aura of the other paintings that are there, been created by the artist.
It is an involuntary choreography in which the artist – even if painting from her atelier in the heart of the city of São Paulo – allows the memory of nature, of the natural spaces experienced and sentimentally kept to be transported to the pictorial plane. Thalita brings to life, thus, landscapes that are in no way inert, paralyzed: sometimes through outlined shapes, precise in contour and perimeter, sometimes through an almost baroque expressivity, that flirts with the built-up and the exuberance of the robust representation of plants, flowers and other vegetable organisms, more or less easy to be identified or digested by the spectator.
It is exactly in this kind of “controlled instability”, precisely executed by the artist in the making of each one of the paintings, where maybe resides the greatest strength of the artist’s production. Her Baile is a true ode to the pictorial process, a kind of visual opera that is made as much as of technique as of what is natural. Her paintings remind us that the beings of the Plantae reign were the first colonizers of the planet, spreading themselves on the virgin land of the planet still inhospitable, crude, as if they were painting the surface of the world.
Painting, in turn, has throughout the centuries aimed at mimicking the exuberance of such phenomenon, reproducing in endless ways the eloquence of nature, so dear to the human life on Earth. Hamaoui, in her practice, stitches together these two worlds. First, we are transported back to a world still uninhabited by human beings, spaces dominated by vegetation and taken by the purity and innocence of a world unknown to us. Then we remember that we came afterwards, in flesh, bone and soul fruit of the nature that surrounds us, in its most distinct shapes and presentations, around the planet.
Her paintings remind us of when we still knew nothing, whatever. But also point us to what later came to constitute, save and strengthen us. In red, green, blue, white, yellow and such. And, above all, in movement. In this way her Baile (Ball) is designed and the artist invites us to dance with her and her paintings.