Gravura Brasileira

ARTIST STATEMENT
ISABEL GOUVEIA

Recover/Recollect/Revision

I cannot ignore that I find beauty in what is no longer wanted. Abandoned pieces of industrial waste catch my eye for their charming color and seductive shapes. They suggest to me their original function and possibilities for what they can become. I recover these bits and incorporate them into intimate sculptural compositions that reference architectural spaces and landscapes.

Connected to a world of mass production, abundant waste and environmental overload, my current work - amalgams of plastics, foam board, high-density foam, wall paint, acrylics, glue, wood and papers - become meditations on the beauty of what we have. While the materials I use were mass generated and quickly disposed of, my recollection of them resolves through selective arrangement so that the essence of what they suggest to me is expressed, offering the cast-off recovery.

Highly abstracted, almost non-objective work has been explored for a century. I still find it a vital and dynamic arena. Artists who particularly interest me include Louise Bourgeois for her inspiring freedom; Ellsworth Kelly for his minimal complexity; the shapes of female meaning of Anish Kapoor; and the materiality and spirituality of Marc Rothko.  But I am not limited to the visual arts as reference.  Architecture also informs my work. I admire architects like Oscar Niemeyer who demonstrates the exuberance of the curve. Le Corbusier improved the living condition in cities through design and function and Antoni Gaudi changed the face of Barcelona with his exotic lines.

Curvilinear shape/line has always been a critical element in my body of work. As an abstractionist, it is a simplification of many elements relevant to my expression:  the feminine curve, an opening, an architectural element, the line that traces a graph or as part of the organic world of swelling hills, fruits and its pods. The nuances and expressive quality of the curve is explored in my painting, printmaking and drawing, and informs all of my work. 

A simple element of architecture, such as an arc across two columns can create a shelter or even a home. This form also represents an opening. Not only the opening in the direct understanding of a door but also a portal in the dreamy direction of the word. Or an exit, perhaps escape from daily life – creating a space of contemplation. Another aspect is related to the feminine; our malleability and comprehension, with some aspects of representing the subtle, sensual beauty and elegance joined with its masculine phallic shapes, containing the meaning of life between two parenthesis. And the house can go from womb to tomb in the line woven by the fates – where the closed space keeps the mysteries and secrets of that body.

The element of a landscape, like a mountain or a hill, I can see far away, from behind or to the front, and feel the blowing directions of the wind. They are literally part of the picture where I come from, with its diversity. The “cerrado’ with its apparent simplicity and calm, full of an impressive relief and life, its smell, hidden noise and secrets, that are only noticed when we get close, is for me very impressive and relevant.

(I took out the quote as it doesn’t relate directly enough)

I had worked on paintings made panel by panel, as they are displayed alongside each other, without a preconception of a final combination. I have used the edges of the canvas creating a dynamic of negative space and this space creates an unknown image that constructs an isolated field of colors. The fields used as monoculture, great areas of one color, little isolated areas, reserved or preserved, as the road or a house,
being seen from above. I call them “Insularity” series.


In my current project I work with mixed media and drawings. I begin by using small pieces of foam board and remnants of frames and this dictates the size.  The random objects and materials that I collect percolate in my mind and the process of creation starts spontaneously. I seek the forms in fragments until I find the shape that expresses my feelings, making possible to materialize my concept, ending as small three-dimensional assemblages.

In a sense, I am not a political criticizer, but thinking about consequences, I believe that, when I bring some of that discharged material to my work, it could trigger some thought about our way of life: “in abundance” opposite many other places with desperate need. That makes my work relevant.


Isabel Gouveia-12.06.2010