A black bird crosses a yellow-green sky. On the canvas, the sun is little more than a suspicion: a pale disk that the atmosphere has almost entirely swallowed, guessed at before it is seen. Not the toucan. Cut out in a flat, opaque silhouette, it receives none of the light from the scene it flies over—it does not yellow with the sky, lose density with distance, or vibrate with the layers of color that make the green plain below pulsate. The black hills on the horizon are equally flat, but they belong to the structure of the landscape: they sustain the junction between sky and earth. The bird belongs to nothing. It hovers freely between the planes, and it is precisely for that reason that the eye comes to rest on it.
It is not just any bird. The toucan is the bird of natural history plates—the drawings of Descourtilz, the lithographs of John Gould, the expeditionary zoology of Spix and Martius—the oversized beak that, within the visual repertoire Europe constructed around Brazil, guaranteed the certificate of exoticism. Mariannita Luzzati returns it emptied out. Without color, without a resplendent beak, without anecdote: pure shadow in transit, a graphic mark cast across the field. The emblem that once served to classify—to confine the bird to a name, a place, a numbered plate—now serves to anchor the gaze to a surface.
The pictorial system the artist has developed over more than two decades begins with backgrounds saturated in green or blue, upon which successive layers of color weave an atmosphere that lowers the tones, dissolves the motif, and separates the painting from its referent. The landscape from which she starts—drawn or photographed during actual journeys—remains there only as the memory of a record, an alibi for the reconstruction of experiences that the mist transforms into something dreamlike. In the new paintings, this system remains in place, but it has begun to coexist with a foreign body. Figures of birds, trees, and small dried shrubs stand out from the misty background without allowing themselves to be touched by it: they are painted with the same pressure and the same value from the first stroke to the last, without fading, without becoming enveloped by the vapor. They reject atmospheric perspective. And, by rejecting it, they reveal it for what it has always been—not a space, but a pictorial construction. The graphic figure returns the background to us as background.
It is worth looking more closely, however, at these shrubs before taking them for shelter. In the paintings in which dry branches rise against blue or red mountains, they have neither root nor ground: they hover, severed, above the waterline, crossing the horizon without belonging to any of the planes, scorched vegetation, leafless, suspended. The eye, fleeing the mist, anchors itself to them; the anchor, however, is attached to nothing. Focus is granted and destabilized in the same gesture, and the gaze, which sought repose, is returned to the atmosphere—which, seen again, no longer seems the same. Nor is it always the line that provides the landing place. In some paintings, the work of anchoring belongs to color: three bright orange mounds in an ice-blue valley, pinkish marks pulsing beneath whitish trees—hues that pierce the lowering of tones with the same frankness with which the incised branch pierces the mist. Painting thus becomes a field of dispute between what is fixed and what is blurred, without either regime prevailing. What these paintings offer the gaze is an unstable harbor, where anchoring and being cast back into the sea of painting are simultaneous operations.
This graphic treatment is not a recent invention. For more than three decades, metal engraving has accompanied Mariannita’s painting, not as a parallel activity but as a permanent school for the hand—and it is from there that the painting inherits part of its syntax. The line of the new shrubs has the economy of drypoint: a single, incisive line, with no possibility of correction, because on a metal plate, regret comes at a price. And in one of the dark green paintings, where two white plants open against the darkness of the background, the logic is entirely reversed: it is light opened within darkness, clarity excavated from density, a procedure of aquatint transposed into oil. The precise word for this gesture is incision—and it is this that physically connects the current paintings to the memory of the burin and acid, suggesting that this engraved body of work, still rarely seen as a whole, deserves, in the near future, an exhibition of its own.
The graphite and colored-pencil drawings brought together here confirm this genealogy by another route. There is no contour in them to delimit, but rather deposit: pigment is laid down in washes with almost no pressure, accumulated grain by grain until the atmosphere takes shape on the paper as layers take shape on the canvas. In one of the graphite works, a dark rock grows denser against a remnant of a world that barely exists—the same struggle between what is fixed and what vanishes, transposed onto the most fragile of supports. The chiasmus is complete: Mariannita draws as one who paints and paints as one who draws—and this is not a rhetorical figure, but a technical description, verifiable to the naked eye, of the circulation between media that has sustained this body of work for more than thirty years.
The current exhibition stages this dispute in space as well. New paintings coexist with works from earlier series, and the confrontation establishes two pasts of a different nature: the exposed past—the earlier paintings, which embody the atmospheric regime in its pure state, dissolution without resistance, mist as a metonym for the dreamlike—and the invoked past—engraving, absent from the walls, present by proxy in the incised line of the branches and in the sharpness of the drawings. The clash between focus and blur thus takes place twice: within each new painting, between shrub and vapor, and throughout the exhibition, between new and older paintings, so that the viewer moves between the two regimes as one changes one’s point of view without leaving the same place.
From this confrontation emerges the exhibition’s decisive movement, which is retrospective. Faced with a sharply defined branch in the recent paintings, the viewer returns to a mist from earlier years and perceives it differently: not as the natural state of this painting, but as a choice. Blur ceases to be a destiny and reveals itself as a decision. It is as though sharpness, available from the earliest metal plates, had been set aside, painting after painting, in favor of atmosphere—and as though the earlier work were suddenly to appear as a long exercise in restraint. The new paintings do not correct the old ones. They make explicit the cost, and the yield, of what those works refused.
Why, after all, the mist? Why would a painter who commands sharpness have chosen, for decades, blur? The more comfortable answer appeals to memory, to dreams, to the distance that recollections place between the eye and the world—and this text has used that answer thus far, because it is not false. Perhaps, however, it is not enough. There is a less comfortable reason, connected to the place reserved for painting in recent decades: on the one hand, it was expected to justify itself as concept, each painting escorted by the thesis that authorized it; on the other, it was expected to justify itself as engagement, accounting for its usefulness in the face of the urgencies of the present. Between these two demands, painting that seeks merely to exercise its own means has come to arouse suspicion, as though it could only be naive or evasive.
Mariannita’s landscapes seem to submit to neither of these judgments—and perhaps it is this absence, more than any manifesto, that places them within the debate. The play of focus and defocus that structures these paintings is a problem articulated in the terms of painting itself: hardly can a statement translate it, hardly can a cause lay claim to it. And if photography also knows blur—the accident of the lens, the blurring of the instant—Mariannita’s is of another nature: not captured, but constructed, wash upon wash, in a time that no shutter records. Mariannita wants to paint. The sentence seems insufficient; it took decades of suspicion in critical discourse for the desire to paint to once again mean something—for it to once again become, in itself, a position. This is not an innocent return: whoever paints mist today paints after everything that has been said against the pleasure of looking, and knows it. Nor is it a matter of complacency: a painting that sought merely to please would offer repose, whereas what these paintings offer is a landing that refuses to be fixed. It is a form of insistence—the wager that pictorial intelligence may be content enough, and that a dry branch against the vapor may hold the viewer for as long, and with as much consequence, as the thesis that might come along to justify it.
What remains is the viewer, faced with an immensity that neither fully welcomes nor expels them. The eye searches for somewhere to rest; it finds a dry branch, a bird in transit, an orange mound, a white plant opening in the darkness; it lands, slides, returns to the mist. There is no repose in these landscapes, and repose is not what they are about, but rather the movement through which the gaze, each time, attempts to find harbor.
Luiz Armando Bagolin
