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48
Les Prairies's artists
FERNANDA GOMES
Untitled, 2012. Courtesy galery Luisa Strina, São Paulo, and galery Emmanuel Hervé, Paris.
Photography : Fernanda Gomes.
Fernanda Gomes's art is distinguished by a particular way of occupying a space
and spreading into it, and by its sensitive interaction with a given environment.
Her productions are linked to places where things happen – exhibition spaces, their
surroundings, the street or the home. Her work is replete with paradox. It is spacious
yet her minuscule materials are sometimes barely visible. It is scattered yet a discreet
grid underlies her composition. Her atonal palette – sand, white, grey – merges into the
surroundings. At the same time details which are compositions in themselves stand out:
a glass of water emphasises a groove in the floor; a gold needle stuck in the wall reaches
out to you and indicates the wall. These multifarious elements are gleaned from all over
the place – the way an animal ferrets about for provisions. Gomez calls them "things":
everyday objects, pieces of furniture, glasses (sometimes full of water), mirrors, coins,
twigs, newspapers, pieces of string, magnets, scraps and fragments. Some (needles, dust,
hair, cigarette ends) are tiny. Gomez examines the architecture to make it her material.
Space is composed of invisible matter; insignificant aspects (rough edges, corners,
windows) become signs and typical shapes. She treats the void as architectonic space,
and dust as a colour. Her compositions are an inner journey to the centre of a constructed
world. In keeping with the Brazilian Neo-Concretists her art is both formal and political.
Through its abstract language it gives rise to the sensitive and intelligible experience of
an invisible, abandoned, poverty-stricken reality at the outer edge of one's gaze.
tr. J.H.
Born in 1960 in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), where she lives and works.
Production
Les Ateliers de Rennes 2012.