VIEWING ROOM

Encontro – Mônica Barbosa e Rayana Rayo

06/05/2023 - 10/06/2023

Critical essay: Catarina Duncan

“The international women’s movements have constructed ‘women’s experience’, as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility.”[1]
A cyborg manifesto, Donna Haraway
 

With never before seen works, commissioned for the project, Mônica Barbosa and Rayana Rayo, present a deep oneiric universe, with paintings of varied dimensions that transit between organic and industrial, figurative and abstract, in a composition that guides us through several subjective constructions.

Mônica Barbosa’s output is related to research that begins to question accessibility, transition, territoriality and arrives in the fertile field of the body, mainly that of the women, in constant deconstruction. Having lived in many cities throughout Brazil, the artist knows the feeling of displacement intimately; the impulse of migratory movement spanning the country directs a huge part of her quest. In one of our conversations the artist reports: “Inside the body, the house, that allows me to go on”. During the last eight years her practice arrived in painting, ancestral gesture of her birthplace, from the rock paintings of Piauí, from red urucum on stone. There is a deep relationship between ancestral painting and ancestral migration in this work, in which we can see landscapes from the inside, bodies under construction, diving and birth.

A árvore que arranha, 2023

A árvore que arranha, 2023

Mônica Barbosa

Mônica Barbosa
Acrylic and oil pastels on canvas
71 x 62,5 x 3,5 cm
R$ Sob Consulta US$ On Request
A noite atrás da porta, 2022

A noite atrás da porta, 2022

Mônica Barbosa

Mônica Barbosa
Acrylic and oil pastels on canvas
65 x 66,5 cm
R$ Sob Consulta US$ On Request

Rayana Rayo consolidates her productions in painting from conversations and relationships, the inside and the outside, also elaborated by Mônica, are here being used as an interior analytic device. The series presented in this show are created in an intense conversation between the artist and her mother, about nearness and distance, while articulating in her life a journey of three aspects: work, identity and maternity. Shadows, encounters, and learning lead to question about what exists inside and outside of body? What does the body generate? In her paintings, the artist talks with herself making decisions within her composition, using her intuition, following other fields and fluxes of thought. There is a line that leads and tells a story through the oeuvres, creating a safe place of change and communication.

Jornada tripla I, 2023

Jornada tripla I, 2023

Rayana Rayo

Rayana Rayo
Oil on canvas
150 x 80 cm
Sold
Jornada tripla II, 2023

Jornada tripla II, 2023

Rayana Rayo

Rayana Rayo
Oil on canvas
150 x 80 cm
Sold
Coisa de acender I, 2023 | Rayana Rayo

Coisa de acender I, 2023 | Rayana Rayo

Rayana Rayo

Oil on canvas
100 x 80 cm
Sold
Coisa de acender II, 2023 | Rayana Rayo

Coisa de acender II, 2023 | Rayana Rayo

Rayana Rayo

Oil on canvas
100 x 80 cm
Sold

A sharp eye will notice an encounter between the human, the animal, and the mechanical in the pieces by both of the artists. This relationship presents other options of worldly perspectives: a oneiric world, organic, relational, internal, that strengthens the sensation of body metamorphoses, from the individual and technology, from body to earth.

We are hybrid and porous beings, the body is central to works of both artists, but a body that amplifies its own definition, escaping from frameworks and rigid structures that don’t bolster us. In her text, Re-enchanting the World, the author Silvia Federici tells us that is necessary for us to “reconnect what capitalism has divided: our relation with nature, with others, and with our bodies, enabling us not only to escape the gravitational pull of capitalism but to regain a sense of wholeness in our lives”[2].

Memórias do subsolo, 2021

Memórias do subsolo, 2021

Mônica Barbosa

Mônica Barbosa
Acrylic and oil pastels on canvas
80 x 50 cm
R$ Sob Consulta US$ On Request
Acolhida por Exú, 2020

Acolhida por Exú, 2020

Mônica Barbosa

Mônica Barbosa
Acrylic and oil pastels on canvas
40 x 60 cm
R$ Sob Consulta US$ On Request
Morrer não é sobre secar, 2021

Morrer não é sobre secar, 2021

Mônica Barbosa

Mônica Barbosa
Acrylic and oil pastels on canvas
70 x 50 cm
Sold
Mãe e filha I, 2023

Mãe e filha I, 2023

Rayana Rayo

Rayana Rayo
Oil on canvas
120 x 120 cm
Sold
Mãe e filha II, 2023

Mãe e filha II, 2023

Rayana Rayo

Rayana Rayo
Oil on canvas
120 x 120 cm
Sold

Noticing the women’s body as fragmented inside social structures in which we live is almost compulsory. The perspective of the works by Mônica and Rayana reduce this narrative to the point of the body presenting itself as disidentified and totally expanded. We have complex relationships with the world, with others, with our bodies, here the artists resume these narratives in a powerful practice of reflection on themselves and potential worlds.

The deep and intimate listening tells us that we are not what people expect of us, as explained to us by Donna Haraway in her text A Cyborg Manifesto, “[the existence of a] Painful fragmentation among feminists (not to mention among women) along every possible fault line has made the concept of woman elusive, an excuse for the matrix of women’s dominations of each other.” We are not and we will not be what people expect, our relationships intertwine and complexify in such unexpected and unique ways.

The subjectivities presented in Mônica and Rayana pieces are of a particular and unique order, external structures won’t end the strength of a body in movement, in transit, relating with others, the strength of a singular maternity in action, the subject that is machine and nature at the same time in the kaleidoscopic whirl of daily life.

A dança, 2022

A dança, 2022

Mônica Barbosa

Mônica Barbosa
Acrylic and oil pastels on canvas
69 x 70,5 cm
R$ Sob Consulta US$ On Request
Da caverna a erupção, 2022

Da caverna a erupção, 2022

Mônica Barbosa

Mônica Barbosa
Acrylic and oil pastels on canvas
60 x 60 cm
R$ Sob Consulta US$ On Request
Dominique, 2023

Dominique, 2023

Rayana Rayo

Rayana Rayo
Oil on canvas
120 x 80 cm
Sold
Ana, 2023

Ana, 2023

Rayana Rayo

Rayana Rayo
Oil on canvas
120 x 80 cm
Sold
Do alto da cabeceira, ouço o segredo dos animais , 2023

Do alto da cabeceira, ouço o segredo dos animais , 2023

Mônica Barbosa

Mônica Barbosa
Acrylic and oil pastels on canvas
149 x 127 x 3,5 cm
Sold
Gavetas da memória, 2023

Gavetas da memória, 2023

Mônica Barbosa

Mônica Barbosa
Acrylic and oil pastels on canvas
180 x 125 cm
R$ Sob Consulta US$ On Request
Tem coisa que só vive se tiver dentro de outras, 2023

Tem coisa que só vive se tiver dentro de outras, 2023

Mônica Barbosa

Mônica Barbosa
Acrylic and oil pastels on canvas
50 x 73 cm cada (Díptico)
R$ Sob Consulta US$ On Request

[1] HARAWAY, Donna. A cyborg manifesto: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the late twentieth century. In: HARAWAY, Donna. Simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature. New York, Routledge, 1985, p. 149-181.

[2] FEDERICI, Silvia. Re-enchanting the world: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. 1st edition. Canada: PM Press/Kairos, 2018.