Some years ago, Gabriela Machado discovered a new side to her creative life. In addition to painting - a vocation which she pursues intensely in the bucolic beauty of her studio -, she chose music as another central element in her relationship with art. But not any kind of music. Of all forms, Gabriela chose samba, more specifically the samba which emanates from the tambourine. It is the syncopation and rhythmic movement of this instrument which, like the paint on her white canvasses, radiates life toward a sea of aesthetic pleasure. When she isn't painting or pursuing the everyday activities of her working life, Gabriela can be found in samba groups, immersed in their collective, democratic, unhierarchical practice, organized with the sole purpose of producing musical joy.
It is worth recalling here that samba and the visual arts have always formed a happy partnership in Brazil. From Heitor dos Prazeres and Di Cavalcanti to Hélio Oiticica and Carlos Vergara, this creative dialogue has resulted in some beautiful moments. In the case of Gabriela, samba impregnated her way of seeing the world, baptizing her canvasses with the names of young mulata girls, and showing her the swing and philosophies of life that the samba players express in a sublime yet accessible form. The beauty of Cartola or Guilherme de Brito, the rawness of Nelson Cavaquinho or the assertiveness of Candeia entered her life and spilled out, in every sense, into her painting.
This intimate relationship between music and painting becomes obvious when we recall a word common to both forms: rhythm. The rhythm of music and the rhythm of painting are fundamental elements in any composition. Both bring to mind temporal and spatial games where the dynamic and colour govern the contrasts between full and empty spaces, between slowness and speed, between light and dark, between folds and indentations. Music and painting are careful arrangements of the occupation of space - sonorous and pictorial.
In Gabriela's abstract painting, one of the first assumptions we can make concerns the rhythm of the colours and the subtle observation of the paths they follow, spread out over the large white canvasses and watercolours. The colours dictate the rhythm of the gaze like the scores of this silent and paradoxically explosive music.
This syncopated explosion, this abundance of colour in the clean and balanced space of her canvasses, are movements which provide the basis for her brute force. And here we forget all the negative feelings which derive from a certain brutality. In Gabriela's work, it is the material colour which is raw in all its full physical and poetic force. It is this brute force which moves us almost unconsciously to a dreamlike state, of the pure pleasure of the forms, at the expense of the oppressing quotidian cycle of the real or documented. Like a samba group, we enter Gabriela's painting without knowing when we will leave, as these are spaces which are realms of pleasure. This is the brute force which takes hold of our senses and launches us into a zone where each of us can strip him/herself of the commonplace to invent new narratives about life and colour.
Dispersed, organic, mobile, the occupation of the white space of her canvasses may, who knows, appear gratuitous in its sensual sinuosity. We do not traverse the samba. This occupation is, on the contrary, the product of Gabriela's intimate and delicate relationship with her vocation. Her paintings present us with the meanderings of the painter's daily engagement with colour, pigments, oil, resins, textures and mixtures. In open, spontaneous, progressive composition, her colours do not compete, they embrace. Little by little, the forms extend their hands and reinvent themselves on this slow mingling path. It is patient work. The painter applies layers of paint to her canvasses and lets them rest in the midst of their process of intermixing. In this way, the big sweeps of colour acquire different intensities with each application. What appear to be rapid strokes are, in fact, paths of colour matured in the calm of an afternoon.
In the current context of Brazilian painting, Gabriela Machado offers in her work an affirmation of abstraction in counterpoint to the photographic realism and perspectives of the world. Her abstraction is not, however, enclosed in internal dialogues of form or monochromatic silences. Her canvasses of pure, moving colour offer the freshness of an encapsulated narrative, ready to burst open in front of our eyes. There is in these paintings, and in Gabriela Machado's work as a whole, the uncontained joy of arms extended toward a contemplative fruition: joy and contemplation which remind us of the pleasure of painting and the vitality of art. Perhaps that is where this brute force resides which leads us to abandon moments of everyday life to immerse ourselves in an art exhibition. Or a samba group.
Frederico Coelho is historian, essayist, researcher and professor at PUC rio de janeiro
Text published in the folder of II Anual Program of Exhibitions 2011, at Centro Cultural São Paulo
