Mata seca, Mata suja: Louise Ganz
The exhibition Mata Seca, Mata Suja presents a series of recent paintings created from walks and immersions in regions of the Minas Gerais cerrado, more specifically in gallery forests, dirty fields and rupestrian fields. With pioneering works in public art and relational art in Belo Horizonte, such as Hotel Bragança (2003), Lotes Vagos (2004/2007), Banquetes (2007) and Museu Campestre (2012), where reflections on the city, nature, politics and participation were fundamental, Louise resumed painting in 2015. Since then, she has been working on issues specific to painting, with a construction procedure through the accumulation of layers, erasures, veils and color fields.
In this series, landscapes are constructed between representation and imagination, where the image is created in a kind of expedition through painting, as well as through the territory. Some notes – paintings on paper – are made in situ, during walks, and larger paintings are made in her studio, located in the Casa Branca region, in Minas Gerais, a region in dispute between nature and mining companies. A tangle of rocks, plants, water, grass and fog appears through the overlapping of paint stains and vigorous brushstrokes.
The title Mata Seca, Mata Suja points to the naming of both a type of cerrado - dry forests - and the erroneous idea historically produced by hegemonic and colonialist discourses that the cerrado is dirty land, capable of being exploited and destroyed. But on the contrary, it is the most biodiverse savanna on the planet, it has more than 12 thousand cataloged plants, it is home to many indigenous peoples and quilombola territories that preserve and use plants for food, medicinal and utility purposes, in addition to being water reserve territories.
The exhibition brings together new works, created since 2021, of large dimensions, between 1.60 and 5 meters, and some small formats on paper, in which it is possible to see the interest in painting, in the earth, in the landscape and in the ways of life.
