The landscape, oftentimes confused with nature, establishes an intimate relationship with the externality individuals in singularities with the world. Its presence in artistic production consists of a visual perception that goes beyond a imagery and thematic presentation, but above all, refers to a production of sensibility in relation to reality.
This relationship can be found in the Gabriel Giucci’s solo exhibition Palmeira Arcaica, a set of that announce a primitive place of the landscape. Through expressive brushstrokes, the productions evoke nature for a poetic reinterpretation in the artist’s wanderings along the coast of Bahia.
If before it was possible to accompany the emblems of a diverse and unequal country through images of fauna, monuments, and portraits of Brazilian politicians in Giucci’s works, now we have a poetic reunion of Brazil facing its origins, in its primordial essence with the natural.
The artist’s pieces attract the eye and awaken the senses by offering a possibility of revisiting the past in a natural and clean setting, in which memory, loneliness and nostalgia invade the mind to understand that the past and the present can blur together. Therefore, in the landscapes of the exhibition Palmeira Arcaica we look at the present as a perception of the memory of the past, which, provides us with a reminder of how the subjects of this land related to its nature.
The paintings deliver a visual repertoire that seeps the past into the cracks of the present as it is contemporarily reinterprets. The wanderings of the artist amidst the winds, the sears, the plants and lands of the coastline of Bahia generated the possibility to deal with the of contact with nature updating how it was with how it poetically is today.
It was through these long walks that expand the paintings and thereby sharpen sensitivity, allowing us to see the dusk and dawn in fields of colour, creating chromatic spaces of the utmost importance to expand the landscape.
Thus, we can see with its potency, materiality, texture and spirit: nature. This which also moves with speed and ease in Palmeira Arcaica; speaking of remote times in poetic dimensions constructed from the memories of the Brazilian territory, in order to rework experiences.
Camila Carmo
Master’s degree holder and PhD candidate in Literature and Culture from the Graduate Program in Literature and Culture (PPGLITCULT) at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA)