The works gathered in the exhibition Mata Seca, Mata Suja reveal Louise Ganz's reunion with the practice of painting, a craft as old as ancestral, pre-capitalist practices, in the midst of which art itself emerges, even if plants, fields, cartography and listening to the place - experiences that also give rise to these works - have been on the artist's horizon since the time of her Lotes Vagos (2004).
This reunion, also motivated by dialogue with other artists and with her students at the Escola Guignard, on the one hand, is also a reunion with her own training, carried out at the interface between painting and architecture. Thus, we can say that these paintings involve a critical review of her own work process and the questioning of the conceptual bias that dominated contemporary art in the first decade of the 2000s, also permeating her production. Another aspect that enters into crisis in this journey is the idea of the artist as a type of ethnographer, very recurrent in that decade, which presupposes a position of distance and defines artistic creation as research or project, which establishes hierarchies between thinking, feeling and do, between practice and theory.
Louise's current work, based on her daily movements in the cerrado that surrounds her studio, without a prior itinerary, on the contrary, relies precisely on proximity and not on projecting something to be done in a territory, like field research, whose synthesis will be made through documents, texts and images, even though photography is a resource used by the artist. When painting, Louise recreates the experience of inhabiting the landscape with her body, and not just through her eyes, as a work of bodily memory. This work is witnessed by the textures of the rocks and leaves, which seem to have been known by touch; the water that flows from the point of view of those who are submerged and emits to us, here outside the frame, the freshness of bathing. The scale of these works reinforces this feeling of presence, of inhabiting, in my view, fundamental to the artist's work as a whole, which even rearticulates the painting-architecture relationship present at the basis of her training.
If we also align the resumption of painting in Louise's work with the growing interest in this language, which today and historically has its way of remaining current in the death-rebirth dynamic, her works also have a unique contribution. If much of the painting done today is anchored in thematic issues and figuration, Louise's work precisely wants to bring us face-to-face with the act of painting, with the significant elaboration of the matter on the support, in time, to put us within the dialogue with the image, which emerges and changes with each gesture, without perspectives or vanishing points. It is clearly stated in these works that the artist's commitment is to the lived experience and the practice of painting, and not to the discursiveness of reality, nor to its illustration.
Thus, there is no scientific truth to be read in these paintings about the cerrado biome, on the contrary, it is the cerrado that is reinvented in Louise's painting, with its many typical and atypical variations, closed and open forests, clean, dirty and murundus. This mysterious and diverse landscape, about which little is known, as the artist acknowledges, offers itself freely as a space for the fictional exercise of painting, as the asparagus painted by Édouard Manet in 1880, for many the inaugural painting of modern art, was ordinarily offered. Through Louise's paintings we can say that painting is also supporting this clash in the field of art history. Painting, as the artist Carlos Zílio once said, implies erasing the ghosts that stand between the painter and the canvas, even before the first gesture, asking them about what can still be added to the world through this ancient craft.
The artist's persistence in this exercise, which results in her current works, is shown in several ways, but, especially, in the overlapping of infinite layers, of stains, in the return to work, in the erasure and inscription of the image until the support is exhausted in this dialogue that continues, often over months, until the work says enough is enough. This way of doing things, we can say, has a feminine character, in the sense that the gestures that make up her painting are not "genius", they are not poured onto the canvas like an assertive, quick and spectacular enjoyment, as performed in an emblematic way by Jackson Pollock drippings. Rather, they are the support of this clash with painting in time, a process that folds in on itself many times, including courage and hesitation, in a spiral temporality that has the density of feminine enjoyment, like greens, grays, oranges, like the sound of bird and the wind that blows through the tangles of rock, water and grass in Louise's paintings.
Izabela Pucu
March, 2024
