Gravura Brasileira

Fonte Luminosa

obras de / works by

Renata BASILE

curadoria / curator: Ana Carla SOLER

abertura / opening

27 Abril 2024/ April 27, 2024

sábado 13- 17h / Saturday 1 - 5 pm

Fonte Luminosa

Solo exhibition by Renata Basile

Imagine the world from a child`s perspective. Her body walks down the street with both arms stretched up holding his parents` hands, one on each side. When you look down, you realize that you are starting to climb a ladder with knee-high steps. When she looks up again, she arrives at the city square and sees in the center a fountain with streams of water that rise and fall in curvilinear movements. In this world dimension, the source is twice the size of her body. For an adult of average height, it is no more than neck height. This scene could have accompanied the thoughts of artist Renata Basile as an affective memory, being remembered when telling childhood stories, but that was not the case. The materialization of the fountain, not as an image, but as a memory, only comes to the artist after dozens of prints are already printed on paper, in an obsessive repetition of the arcing movement that the water lines draw in the air.

When I visit her in her studio, in June 2023, most of the prints are lined up side by side on one of the walls of the room. What didn`t fit on the wall occupied the upper part of the library, with drawers that housed other pieces. There were also works on the large press at the back of the studio. Looking at the set of prints by Renata Basile is a landscape perspective.

"Fonte Luminosa" is the organization of series formed organically over the last year of Renata Basile`s production, a return to her childhood memory that relates her experience in the world as the flow of water in the fountain, dating back to her childhood. The Correnteza, Cachoeira and Meridianos/Laterais series are in the rooms of Galeria Gravura Brasileira, the artist`s investigations into arcs, lines, weaves, lines and overlaps, which create unique prints that come from the same matrix. The artist sees serialization as a field of exploration. These are not large-scale works, but rather works that reflect the underworld of repetition, as a cyclical movement.

The result are works that produce an optical effect, showing lines that sometimes intersect, sometimes tangent and sometimes follow each other in parallel. They form a kind of holography of the movement of water and recall the fountain in the city square of Basile`s childhood.

Scratches, which are traditionally abhorred in metal engraving, in Basile`s works gain not only freedom, but also technique. They are carefully left by the acid work and manifest themselves by breaking the rigidity in the line, recording a haze around the line. They are like water droplets that form a cloud of smoke when waterfalls fall.

Ana Carla Soler