There is a certain kind of artist who spends a lifetime trying to see the world anew, as though for the first time; for whom making art will always mean learning how to make it again. Such an artist begins by accepting—and even celebrating—contingency. Whatever is encountered in the streets or museums, through meaningful chance, becomes the living substance of the work. Yet it falls to the artist, and to the artist alone, to bring it to life. The grace of this topological fluidity between life and art, between being and making, is not bestowed gratuitously—it must be worked for, sustained, earned.
An unassuming experimentalism, grounded in a state of permanent openness and supported by considerable reserves of formal energy, has run through Gabriela Machado’s work from her ephemeral Coffee Paintings (late 1980s) to her recent outlandish sculptures. There are no stages or preparatory studies because there is no foreknowledge. From the outset, the artist engages with recalcitrant techniques and materials in search of forms that seem determined, at all costs, to resist becoming Form. The freshness of these discoveries, almost always luminous, thus arises from a certain agony. Only extraordinary commitment, only the incalculable discipline of improvisation, can resolve the dilemma posed by each sudden appearance. Discoveries are recognized as such only when things finally reveal themselves.
Under the spell of Giorgio Morandi, so cherished by successive generations of modern Brazilian artists, Gabriela Machado produced an important series of large-scale drawings during the 1990s. One of the recurring questions of Brazilian modernism reemerges here: how can we move beyond our proverbial intimacy, the evident product of the private conditions under which art has historically been practiced in Brazil? By gaining scale and demanding an emphatic physical presence, these drawings compelled the artist’s body toward direct, desublimated movement. At moments of reconfiguration, the challenge of scale symptomatically returns to the work—it would seem that the artist must act within the work, even lose herself inside it, so that it may discover its necessarily unpredictable course. Precisely because it arises from a nervous perception that has enchanted and excited the artist’s retina, the painting must expand and transfigure itself to the very limits of plausibility. The historic visual liberation inaugurated by Impressionism continues to function here as a guiding principle. Now, however, what "impresses" is the entire body, acquiring motor force and a behavioral dimension. As contemporary art, each attempt at painting must withstand the test of convincing us of the cognitive and imaginative power of material appearances on a planet literally hypnotized by the virtual. Under such circumstances, even assuming an informed viewer, the painting must either awaken the gaze—urgently and intriguingly—or go entirely unnoticed.
In my view, Jorge Guinle’s work throughout the 1980s reactivated our pictorial field, restoring the question of painting under contemporary conditions. A question that, of course, extends far beyond his precocious and cruelly interrupted oeuvre. Gabriela Machado, among others, benefited from that encouragement. Not because she devoted herself to Guinle’s canvases or revolved within their orbit; in fact, they left only traces here and there. Rather, the example of such an erudite, free, and uninhibited practice reauthorized the contemporary adventure of painting. And if it sought to continue the investigative modernist tradition, then in the particular case of the young Gabriela Machado, this renewed question of painting would have to interrogate its very origin: the phenomenon of pure visuality. Her immediate response to optical stimulus remains, after so many years, intrinsic to the work. So much so that the construction of the painting itself becomes inseparable from the intensity of light it is capable of emitting. In this way, it fulfills its primary obligation: to intensify the visibility of the world. It reiterates the perennial demand of Western metaphysics: to save appearances. Here, however, this achieves something altogether different from the original Platonic maneuver—for appearances, in the end, merely participated in essences. Let us dismiss, as beneath consideration, the degraded everyday expression that has become the golden rule of hypocrisy. To poetically save appearances means to dignify the common element of the Lifeworld, to respond willingly to its impulses and provocations.
Fleeting appearances belong to the ceaseless metabolism of life; they animate the texture of the world and encourage the exercise of a logic of uncertainty. They are by no means images, much less representations. As soon as the seductive Red Stains (1999–2002), for example, become pacified, threatening to turn into prestigious signs of authorship, they are summarily abandoned. An easy public reading froze their restless form into beautiful images. Time, I believe, will eventually resurrect them. It is a healthy regime of aesthetic hygiene—this artist, at least, wishes to banish her own shadow as far away as possible. She paints in the present, under the irresistible appeal of the future. Bouquets and flower vases thus gradually transfigure themselves into somewhat unsettling, absurd pictorial formations, poised to emerge from the canvas and disturb domestic tranquility. This is Gabriela at her finest, without question: the artist who succeeds in imploding composition, defying conventional notions of balance and proportion. What is strange, and somewhat inexplicable, is that despite everything, these canvases remain attractive, radiating a contrary yet captivating beauty. In part, certainly, because of the fervor with which they were painted. Perhaps they convey the ethical happiness characteristic of things that possess integrity, in which thought and action coincide.
Every a priori thus becomes anathema, for it would paralyze a compulsive activity that neither knows (nor can know) its own scope or measure. Without relegating them to oblivion—for they too are produced with dedication—the small canvases, watercolors, and semi-figurative drawings never quite transgress their motifs; they preserve their latent memory. I prefer to think of them as contemplative pauses, indispensable moments in which the work recovers its breath before each decisive new beginning. To begin again means to renew anxious contact with the artist’s own unfinished destiny.
The unexpected and imperative call of sculpture marked yet another radical beginning in the work. At first glance, everything about this unprecedented engagement with clay and ceramics would seem hostile, contrary to the artist’s volatile temperament. For the past three or four years she has devoted herself to the demanding process of learning—and unlearning—the rudiments of this ancient technique, which serves only to contradict the well-known impatience of her painterly gestures. The production process is mediated, slow, and discontinuous, passing through the kiln and sometimes culminating in bronze casting. Not to mention the inevitable complications: cracks, explosions, and carbonization. To attempt to describe it, I too must do everything at once: the thorny (and pleasurable!) task is to conjure so many disparate operations into a single spontaneous, swift, and casual object. Clay manipulated to exhaustion; the pieces taken to the kiln; paint then applied freely; finally arranged on provisional, interchangeable raw wooden bases—an accumulation of efforts that ends up resembling a Surrealist objet trouvé, a fortuitous object discovered by chance under favorable circumstances. They recall kitsch figurines in the midst of a metamorphosis into works of art. Some perhaps evoke Willem de Kooning’s oily brushstrokes, which, by force of extroversion, have leapt into space. Most seem instead like Gabriela Machado’s volatile paint in an accelerated process of solidification. And as they continue to grow, these sculptures now oscillate between wedding cakes and Medusas. In doing so, they reaffirm the characteristic operation of the work’s imaginary: always occupied with redeeming the fallen beauty of everyday objects, regenerating figures and forms worn down by the mistreatment of inattentive consumption, which ignores the mystery of appearances.
Whatever they may be, these madcap sculptures renew the work’s forward-looking vocation, intensifying its lyrical tone. They multiply, proliferate, invade the surrounding space with the reckless ambition of adding their imaginary formations, pure and simple, to conventional reality. What they may initially suggest to our conditioned gaze matters little. What matters is to make and unmake the experience of them, to accompany them through their accident-prone becoming, at times joyful, at times painful. Apparently, they seek to propagate themselves in a perpetual state of transformation. The drives of life recoil from anything definitive, knowing full well what it is synonymous with.
