Um porto instável, um pouso possível : Mariannita Luzzati

Mariannita Luzzati: Um porto instável, um pouso possível

Albuquerque Contemporânea presents "Um porto instável, um pouso possível", a solo exhibition by artist Mariannita Luzzati, bringing together previously unseen paintings and drawings, curated by Luiz Armando Bagolin.

For more than three decades, Mariannita Luzzati has developed a pictorial practice devoted to landscape, exploring the relationships between atmosphere, memory, distance, and perception. In her works, scenes originally observed while traveling or recorded through photography are subjected to successive layers of color that dissolve their references and transform the landscape into an ambiguous space, situated between the recognizable and the imagined. Skies, mountains, trees, and horizons emerge and disappear within fields of greens, blues, and other muted tones, as if they were memories in the process of being formed and erased.

In her most recent production, this atmospheric universe begins to coexist with elements of more assertive presence. Birds, trees, and small shrubs appear as sharply defined figures against misty backgrounds, resisting the atmospheric perspective that traditionally integrates the elements of a landscape through distance and variations in light and color. Rather than dissolving into the pictorial space, these forms remain suspended, almost like inscriptions upon the surface of the painting.

It is within this tension between sharpness and blurring that Luzzati’s new body of work takes shape. Dry branches, plants, birds, or patches of color assume the role of points of anchorage for the gaze, yet none offers definitive rest. The landscape thus becomes a field of tension between what is fixed and what dissolves, a space in which seeing means continually searching for a place to land.

By bringing together previously unseen works and paintings from different periods of Luzzati’s production, the exhibition highlights an important shift in her research: the mist, once predominant, reveals itself not as a destination, but as a pictorial choice. In contrast with the sharpness of the recent works, the earlier paintings can be revisited from a new perspective, revealing the complexity of a language constructed between presence and disappearance.

For Luiz Armando Bagolin, this movement also reaffirms a position in relation to painting itself. Throughout her career, Mariannita Luzzati has developed a language that does not depend on an external narrative to sustain itself. Focus and blur, saturation and rarefaction, presence and absence constitute questions formulated within the very terms of painting. The mist is not merely a representation of memory or dream, but a material and a procedure; the blur is not an accident, but a patient construction achieved through successive layers of translucent glaze.