Gravura Brasileira

Small unimportant mistakes

       The error usually arises from a mistake or a slip. It is the occurrence of an act not calculated, an inaccuracy which is beyond the original design. Graphic arts small errors are observed in printing, which may be out of registration, with a thinner color or a problem in the array that leaves the apparent lack of finish. Rather than take little mistakes as part of the process, Ana Calzavara makes them an expressive resource. This could be a contradiction in that, if the goal is to reach the error, he would cease to be a failure and become an end, the full realization of a project. However, the artist explores some errors in its voltage and power attached to them, as their language elements.

       This appreciation by small imperfections reveals, in fact, an operation to give voice to chance, to fray the rules, what is beyond the programmed. So the little mistakes unimportant become key in his poetic, precisely because they are technical achievements, partly provided in part incorporated unforeseen, that convert to a deliberate intention to recognize the quality of minor defects. If only from the modern, there`s a correct model or paradigm to be followed in the art, the work of Ana Calzavara investigates the "mistake" as the strategy work.

      The landscape recurs in prints or artist impressions of photographs. Despite being a genre traditionally linked to the representation of a given space, draws attention in his work how the weather turns slowly the protagonist. Meanwhile, the landscape sometimes not fully revealed. It is the emphasis on passing from one frame to another that comes the link with cinema. However, the film causes illusion of motion from a sequence of twenty-four frames per second. Already at work Small mistakes unimportant there is another sense of time.

Omega Replica        Six images taken from six different angles, which are not placed in sequence are distributed side by side separately. It is as if each image arose between temporal and small gaps lapses. The prints are organized almost like a kaleidoscope, from a geometrical mirror structure. Tree branches bifurcate, are reflected and, at times, give the feeling of continuity between the images. Soon after this illusion vanishes and appears chaotic whole, as well as micro gaps and interruptions in the alignment of the pictures. Other work (The pulse of all time) brings together the same six overlapping frames. Thus the layers intertwine, connect, move away and create lights and various textures. It is as if the overlay brought condensation time instead of the dispersion of the six previous frames. Everything starts to happen at once, in one place, a dense and blurred sum of images. There spacing of frames in a sense of continuous succession, as in the movie, but the procedure of holding all in one space, the role. Thus, the artist invents dimensions that the images would not be alone.

      In game of hopscotch, Ana Calzavara works with a sequence of images that have as a starting point only a picture that is repeated and turns. It is the succession of the same event, a moment in which a piece of a tree comes from a monochrome sky. The emphasis is on figure-ground relationship, negative-positive, as if one became another. At times there is a pause that brings the back to front, either white or ocher walls, either black or gray of printed papers. The interleaved empty and prints monochromatic planes in sequence serve as the breather assembly elements and, at the same time, part of the working space of the exhibition room. Two prints with small mismatches, somewhat off record, also contribute to giving the whole an inaccurate calculation of play, as a dialectic without synthesis. The first is the overlapping of positive and negative images in which the chromatic contrary not vanish and remain pulsing. The other has a photo print on Woodblock - the resulting stain while scrambles, provides three-dimensionality and motion in the image.

       The work of Ana Calzavara handles continuities and ruptures between images. The artist operates either by juxtaposition, sometimes merging arrays. A sequence of four prints a colorful landscape is as if the same picture is transformed into another just by the place where it is positioned in the set. The effect also remember what the movie is called travelling, where there is a camera displacement in space. However, the result is similar to an overview, in which the camera rotates on its own axis horizontal. Minor interference made by the artist in the images makes us discover with surprise that we are moving in around the same scene and return to the starting point.

         The flight of a gloomy vulture around a goal post on a beach deserted whichever is why a series of eight cinematic landscapes done in woodcut. It is as if each print bring a different angle of the same scene. Some elements are interchangeable and appear in different impressions, making every picture unique. Although the scene did not go at night, it is not a solar and radiant vision, but a light of sunset, a sunset. The ocher, light and dark at the same time, prevails in the set. It`s like we decoupage of an event in different planes and sockets. We have distanced perception, overflight, something far from the angle of who actually inhabit the land. The angles are indented, as if they could be omniscient and capture all the loneliness and melancholy of the world.

          The same atmosphere of emptiness and silence reappears in Conte d`amour, which also brings fragments, but in this case the parts fit together and form a single panel. It is an engraving whose initial image a little drawing, but it brings something of the language of painting, with its vibrant colors. Landscape and human figure living and underline a contemplative mood.

But the great self-portrait of the artist with closed eyes indicates a move back on itself, as the search for an inner landscape. The self-reflection as a return to the world of subjectivity is at the same time, the encounter with oneself, others and the space around, even if they do not coincide completely. A similar mismatch space can be found again in the sum of two arrays of woodcuts and a photo printed in methacrylate. It is precisely the inaccuracy in the registry, a lack of full coincidence of the images, which sets a "small error".

Reproducible means, whether manual or mechanical, always deal with the reiteration. Each copy should be identical to each other. But the artist, also in response to the technicality that dominates the contemporary world, prefers to operate in a more human way, a repetition that is not fully complete, as it will purposely turning slowly. Like a butterfly effect, small mistakes unimportant, sometimes imperceptible to the naked eye, can generate a tsunami. But the repetition of the gesture makes, in his interior, differences arise, the standard procedures of absence or minimum misfits.

       Instead of the absolute, what matters is the fragile and vulnerable. The trial in the work of artist feeds the unknown, what will be put to the test and therefore of what is still not recognized as a set value. Ana Calzavara flees the maximum completeness which tends to be sterile, stagnant, which does not open for the future and for the incompleteness of the world. It`s the little unimportant errors that do their fruitful work and enable it to develop into the indeterminate.

Cauê Alves

August 2014

 Ana Calzavara nasceu em Campinas, São Paulo, em 1971. É graduada em Artes Plásticas pela Unicamp, pós-graduada em Pintura pela Byam Shaw (Londres), mestre e doutora em Poéticas Visuais pela ECA-USP. Já participou de mostras individuais no Centro Cultural São Paulo (2001) e no Museu da Imagem e do Som (MIS). Dentre suas exposições coletivas recentes destacam-se: VIII Premio Arte Laguna, em Veneza, Itália (2014) e a 8th Biennale internationale d’estampe contemporaine de Trois-Rivière,  no Canadá. (2013).  Seu trabalho está em coleções como Museu da Imagem e do Som de São Paulo (MIS); Museu de Arte Contemporânea do Rio Grande do Sul (MAC-RS); Museu de Arte Contemporânea do Paraná (MAC-PR); Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Santo André, SP e Museu Olho Latino, Atibaia, SP.

GRAVURAS - Ruth Kelson

A Exposição trata de um dos grandes mitos da humanidade presente no Genesis: a criação e a expulsão do Paraíso. Estes temas recorrem em meu pensamento e em meus trabalhos.

Qual a culpa de Adão e Eva? Qual a culpa de nossa humanidade, que se desempenha tão mal em ser o guardião do Jardim do Éden, conforme lhe foi ordenado? Quando adquirimos o terrível presente da Árvore do Conhecimento, estávamos preparados para ele? Ou seríamos como crianças desamparadas, expulsos com violência e indignação do lugar que nos abrigava e em nada igual à tarefa que tínhamos diante de nós?

Ruth Kelson é natural do Rio de Janeiro. Formada pela Faculdade de Medicina da UFRJ em 1975. Residente em Brasília de 1980 até 2005, trabalhando inicialmente como médica homeopata e a partir do ano 2000, como artista plástica. De 2009 até 2011 - mestrado em Ciências da Religião na PUC-SP sob orientação do Professor Luis Felipe Pondé. Tema de dissertação: “Hanna Arendt e a abrangência do conceito de Banalidade do Mal”. Retomou suas atividades artísticas a partir de 2012.