Wilma Martins
1934, Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil. Lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Drawing, painting and etching are essential practices in Wilma Martins' production. Using drawing as a point of departure for painting is a tradition that recognises it as a preparatory technique. The unique aspect of Martins' work is that she goes from drawing to painting and then back to drawing, such as in the series Cotidiano (1974-1984). Each piece was initially made using India ink and watercolour, and later recreated with acrylic on canvas. From 1979, the artist introduced another stage in her process by redrawing in a notebook the compositions created in previous years, including a record of the original date and the medium used. The notebook seems to refer to the tradition that assigned the technique of etching with the task of disseminating the pictorial works of great masters. However, by adding new scenes, Martins' gesture goes beyond the idea of cataloguing. Amongst dressing table objects, crockery and clothing items that constitute household intimacy, we see forests, bushes and wild animals that are unusual in the context. Nevertheless, given how they are placed in the scene these characters seem at ease, as if in their own habitat, and belonging comfortably in this human routine, far from the idealised nature of the pictorial tradition. Nature and animals are the only elements with colour in the series. The house, objects and furniture are illustrated with the artist' sharp black outline and work as a dividing line between the paleness of banal items of daily experience (represented on a large scale) and colourful fragments scattered on the paper and canvas with minuscule creatures. Despite functioning within the antagonism between inside and outside, domestic and wild, known and unknown, big and small, artificial and natural, the artist's compositions create a peculiar interweaving of the represented dimensions. On the blank canvas or paper, the emergence of a natural world disorganises the construction of an everyday experience created by the drawn lines. In the scenes, we can see the irruption of a world characterised by the impermanence of nature or a symbolic disruption, evoking the ungovernable things of childhood, as if in an oneiric dimension that only lightly touches reality. Going through this topology is like touring the images of the unconscious, where the real and the imaginary (fantasy) are not easily distinguishable. Through the prism of surrealism, the oneiric and unconscious dimensions are, above all, political as they are able to convert symbols made numb by the immobility of our bourgeois existence into sparks of reverie and fascination. In Martins' compositions, household objects, drawers, wardrobes and half-opened doors expose the human presence whilst acting as a metaphor for the idea of overcoming or crossing thresholds. Perhaps the threshold of reason is one of them, when unexpected crossings create gaps in everyday spaces or in the gates that contain the absurd, the fables and the myths. ——Hortência Abreu
From the series Cotidiano [Everyday], 1981. Paper, watercolor and pen and ink. 18 × 15,6 cm.