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concentrated on her silent drawings that evoke distant worlds, bridges and mountains, physical and mnemonic spaces, a place for dreaming and solitude, not of experiences and experiments that must be conquered. In this combinatory play of mental and manual activity, Cinto invokes her heroes in order to traverse a sea of influences: from Giotto to Klein, from Géricault to Kabakov, from Magritte to Leonilson, from Guignard to Louise Bourgeois, there is room in her boat for those artists who are most significant to her and to the history of mankind. Her invocations are epiphanies in that they are not always recognizable and in some cases are intentional. In this way we
see at times a formal approach, at times just the allusion to an idea or atmosphere. Let’s take as an example the installation (Untitled) presented by the artist to the São Paulo Biennial in 1997. There, Cinto drew on the building walls and on a photograph of her arm, thus appropriating architecture and the illusory game of flesh—the flesh of her arm on one of the arms of the building projected by Oscar Niemeyer. In this fusion of the space of the artist’s own body and the body that receives her, it is impossible not to be reminded of Klein’s anthropometric actions, and also Piero Manzoni’s “body signatures.” In many of her installations, Sandra Cinto creates spaces—workrooms,
Under the Sun and the Stars, 2004. Interior view at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York. Artist collection. Photo: Oren Slor. Courtesy: Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.
rooms for sleeping, rooms for dreaming—that are clearly inspired by Kabakov’s work. Under the sun and the stars (2004), presented at the Museu de Pampulha, in Belo Horizonte, once again appropriates Modernist utopian space (Oscar Niemeyer) in order to build an atemporal space filled with images of light (photographs and drawings), fragments of bodies (hands, arms), that recall the presence of the artist and her tenuous desire to freeze time (childhood? A visit to a work of art in an Italian church?, etc.) This work is, it turns out, her response to Kabakov’s The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment, yet, contrary to the lone character who jumps from his home in Kabakov’s work, it is the artist herself who flies here, within the viewer’s mental space, since, as we enter this room, we are subjected to the image and pictorial impregnation offered by the artist. In Construction (2006), Cinto transformed the Casa Triángulo into her personal chapel and filled the space with myriad stars and celestial bodies hand-drawn and painted on little pieces of paper. The result was astonishingly similar to the visual and sensorial impregnation of Giotto’s chapel. This installation/occupation took us to a space of the deepest and most silent mystery, something religious and transcendent. Born out of the artist’s in loco experience during her visit to Padua, this installation made us traverse space in the direction of the site often quoted as one of the most enigmatic created by the Italian master of the Quattrocento, who so fascinated artists like Yves Klein, Bill Viola, and Cinto. In the series The Difficult Journey (After Géricault) (2008), presented at Tanya Bonakdar in New York, and at the MACUF Museum in La Coruña, Spain (2007), the artist takes Géricault’s romantic icon and lovingly deconstructs it. Appropriating the sinuous lines of the bodies in motion created by the painter, Cinto produces a space that evokes the effectiveness of sinuosity in that painting. Sandra Cinto’s difficult pathway is