Critical essay: Priscyla Gomes
In tiny notebooks full of marks of paint and other remnants of studio materials, Heloisa Hariadne discreetly keeps a series of poems and aphorisms written between one immersion and another in pictorial practice. They are fluid, unpretentious notes which encourage taking a breath and starting over in her work, establishing a curious and rhythmic complementarity between writing and painting.
Having these notes in hand was a substantial and inadvertent gift. A delicate opening to the lucubrations, processes and constitution of Heloisa Hariadne’s imagery universe. Poetry, like painting, is time and the coexistence of these languages presupposes recurrences, cycles, returns and reversals. A myriad of non-linear processes – not always tangential when we come into contact with the works – that can emerge here in this exhibition.
In search of her images, Hariadne transits between painting and writing, between one canvas and another, between her artistic practice and her intimate daily life, making this circularity a permanent state. As the artist herself affirms, this state transcends the most mundane activities and permeates existential and political issues, encompasses her relationship with food, the rescue of her ancestry, concerns about the visual arts system and the ethical commitment to her work and her peers.
There is a clear energy expressed in the environments fabulated by her, enveloped by a fantastic atmosphere that combines successive elements in suspension. It is not about mere representational information, but it is a complementarity between things that inhabit a fertile and idyllic nature.
This energy also allows one to question the hegemony of the visuality, permitting the extraction of kinetic and sonorous qualities from their respective atmospheres. As Hariadne jotted, ‘to listen is to see and to see is to feel’. Her images provide us with sparks to dream, to activate our sensorial perception to the point of discerning colours, textures and aromas. There is something of the sapid, the olfactory and the audible that crosses the plane and goes beyond the imagetic construction of these atmospheres.
As Leda Maria Martins summarizes, ‘The art is a godsend and an offering’. The synesthesia banquets by Hariadne bestow beauty, exuberance and daring without abdicating from the obligation that every offering is also a sharing: of affection, memories and colonial scars.
Reflecting on the nature of this sharing also reveals some of the positions taken by the artist faced with the choice of each element and its painting process. In some recent works, such as Antes de encontrar beleza me encontrei no que vejo em você [Before finding beauty I found myself in what I see in you] (2023), the human figure leaves the scene. What could seem like just a simple suppression of one or more of the elements, is actually an important rearticulation in the pictorial treatment. The black bodies, currently used by Hariadne, are the pronouncement of her compositions, they structure the space and work as a kind of centripetal force on the plane of the canvas. They are particular figures that she chose to do with an oil stick, to give light and contrast to the skins. The choice is a conscious one, it seeks a translation of the uniqueness and power of these individuals in the process.
The condition of these bodies, although synergistic with these terrestrial and aquatic atmospheres, is seen by the artist herself as a form of adequacy, as if they had to compress themselves to fit there.Between the way she adopts to approach these bodies and the other elements she lists, Hariadne demarcates different and distinct positions, which is also evident by the majority use of acrylic in fluid and delicate gestures, with thin layers, which cover practically the entire surface of her canvases.
To the plurality of flora and fauna examples, musical instruments, props, huge ships and characters are added, that often seem as if they have come from a children’s story or oneiric reality. Their precedence is related much more with fragments of memory that randomly materialize than a clear demarcation of temporalities and contexts. ‘There are things that we were born knowing, the hands demonstrate memory’: It is on this sentiment that the artist bases herself to build her universe.
Among many aspirations materialized on the paper, Ariadne asks herself about the validity of the process that she started using in 2022 during a residency at Entrevaux commune, in France. ‘I am not sure if words are suitable for talking aesthetically about what we are or what we can be’. Her lacunar excerpts give rise to bridges between the unconscious immensity of aspiration and unrest and the coexistence with the extraordinary. To enter into her flux and receive her offering, it is necessary to take part in her decision to ‘dance with your back to the steamroller of time’.
